Will Dennison

@ASFleischman Presumably this will become a standard part of any settlement with the government, equally available to all citizens.

I don't mean to seem overheated. But Trump has really messed up the economy, launched an impulsive and poorly thought out war with Iran, and has stolen billions of American dollars. He is bad president.

@aytchellesse It’s all so amazingly incoherent. In the name of self-ID and “gender identity”, the “gender identity” of most people must be erased. Only trans folks can assert their identities; non-trans identities seem to have meaning only insofar as they are appropriated by trans people.

yes, woman would be a distinct gender identity. but then because the protected attributes are named for the whole category (e.g. "race" rather than "people of colour"), woman might be understood as a privileged gender identity unlikely to face discrimination. i think they'd probably want to run sexism/misogyny as sex discrimination, rather than as gender identity discrimination.

reading the giggle v tickle (2026) judgement that was published yesterday. some interesting departures from trans activist ideology: 1) the gender identity of a transwoman is "transwoman", _not_ "woman". that means transwomen do not share a gender identity with women. universal gender identity is false. 2) discrimination can be done on the basis of "a characteristic that appertains generally to persons who have the same gender identity as the aggrieved person". this characteristic, according to the judgement, is looking like a man. 3) transwomen, as a distinct protected group (_not_ trans people generally), have in common that they look like men. 4) as usual, no explanation is offered for why a transwoman is a type of woman rather than a type of man. the judgement refers to "gender identity" that is different from "sex assigned at birth" but does not explain what gender identity has to do with sex. e.g. "" transgender" which refers to a person whose gender identity is different from their sex as registered at birth". 5) the federal court decision effectively prevents the exclusion of males from female-only spaces due to the fear that if that male-appearance person turns out to be a transwoman rather than an ordinary man, the exclusion can turn out to have been direct discrimination. you don't need to actually be treating someone worse _because you believe they are trans_. 6) this is so genuinely absurd—that the shared characteristic of transwomen on the basis of which they might be discriminated against is also shared with ALL MEN—that giggle will surely win on appeal to the high court. that's my saturday morning hot take, anyway. ⭐

@tracewoodgrains No opium or crackers SO FAR. 🧐

140 years after the Boston Daily Advertiser worried that Mormons and Chinese would occupy territories as far east as Omaha, Nebraska, its prophecy of a "Chinese-American combination" was fulfilled when I met my Chinese-American husband in Omaha. No opium or crackers, though.

@BerkeleyBeetle @jadler1969 There is no primary. This is for the general election in 3 weeks.

@jadler1969 You are. This is one of those "make a non-attack ad in the primary to get the easier opponent to face in the general" ads

I am clearly not the audience for this ad

@C_Kavanagh Gotta be careful there. youtu.be/vPY4HPWrL7Q?si…

For the benefit of those who are not familiar with my account... yes I am being sarcastic.

Ryan Grim offers astute analysis here.

@JonahDispatch @CathyYoung63 Cinéma vérité.

This is pretty solid.

@groversmith1 Is the assignment to create a factual basis for the administration to argue to a court that such congressional subpoenas should be quashed as harassing?

This guy gets the assignment.

@david030x @KelseyTuoc @StatisticUrban You said “Nobody serious argues that the end goal is arithmetic parity in every occupation.” So what is the end goal?

@KelseyTuoc @StatisticUrban Nobody serious argues that the end goal is arithmetic parity in every occupation. The current distribution isn’t neutral though. It was produced by specific historical and social mechanisms that simultaneously sorted women into certain jobs and depressed the wages of those jobs.

for those of you who are unaware, British employment commissions have in the past found that you need to pay people the same salary for *completely different jobs* if one job attracts more men and the other more women. and that this claim can be backdated to bankrupt you.

@jessesingal Nullius in verba is a good principle to defend.

2/ This idea that if we want to discern the truth of some *genuinely complex* controversy, we simply find a friendly Expert and defer to them... this is delusional I Completely Disagree With Ken Jennings About Experts jessesingal.substack.com/p/i-completely…

1/ ATTENTION: I am now in a fight with Jeopardy! host Ken Jennings, in the sense that he posted about me once on Bluesky and I have written a long response. Joking aside I think there are some pretty fundamental issues at stake here and I vehemently reject his approach.

@AliceFromQueens @micyoung75 Why? A small personal injury claim wouldn’t even be worth his lawyers bringing it to his attention.

@micyoung75 he probably feared a lawsuit

Noah Hawley attended Jeff Bezos's private Campfire retreat in 2018. His wife broke her wrist. He told Bezos directly - not as complaint, just as human information from one husband and father to another. Bezos looked horrified, an aide materialized instantly, and he was whisked away. No "I'm so sorry." No "do you need anything." Just escape. Hawley's thesis in The Atlantic is not that the ultra-wealthy are evil. It is something more precise and more unsettling: that moral reasoning develops through consequences, and the environment of extreme wealth systematically removes consequences from a person's life. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, fire anyone who disagrees with you, and exist in a social circle entirely composed of people who need something from you - the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark. This is different from classic narcissism, which typically masks insecurity. What Hawley is describing is something rarer: a self-definition in which the individual has genuinely grown to the size of the universe and the universe has contracted to fit. Elon Musk calling empathy "the fundamental weakness of Western civilization." Trump asked about checks on his power saying the only thing that could stop him was his own morality. Peter Thiel concluding that freedom and democracy are incompatible. These are not poses. They are the logical endpoint of a psychology shaped by years of operating in a world that never pushed back. The Bezos encounter is the piece's sharpest detail because it is so small. He was not cruel. He was not contemptuous. He simply could not locate, in that moment, the impulse to respond like a person who understood that another person's wrist hurt.

@tracewoodgrains @wesyang Do you think someone can “live in such a way” as to be recognized as the heir to the throne of England, despite having no claim by parentage or history?

@WillDennison10 @wesyang sure, and here the operative question is not "can you recreate yourself as a birthright US citizen?" but "can you live in such a way where it is appropriate for you to be a US citizen?"

This is a healthy, wise move, presented with commendable seriousness. I'd like to use it as a jumping-off point for something more: I've long sympathized with people who see themselves as "autogynephiles," but I increasingly think it's a bad term and people should not identify with it. It shrinks something people experience as meaningful and central to their ideals to the shadow they are ashamed of, and it convinces them it's the only way to be rigorous and serious about it. As with every map-of-the-mind, people are circling around an underlying set of experiences that exists and trying to pull out the most parsimonious model of it. For Ray, the set of experiences seems to look something like "is deeply interested in femininity, wants it to take a central role in his life, strongly identifies with it aesthetically and as a way of being, feels more at peace when he leans into it, and experiences all of that as good and healthy and pure. also: masturbates to it and has spent his whole life hating himself for that." Look, I don't understand the specific interest. Perils of my own orientation, I suppose. Why be feminine when men are so hot? But I do understand the shape of the shame. For me, it was wolves instead of femininity. I was obsessed with wolves as a teenager, comically so. Did school projects on them, looked for books and shows about them, curated an art gallery full of beautiful wolf art, got a wolf picture and a werewolf calendar for my walls. I wrote my protagonists and roleplay characters as stoic, bare-chested tribal wolf-men who had nobody and needed nobody, were good at fighting but hated it, felt caged by civilization and dreamed of escape into the wild. And I also, completely unrelated to that passion that openly and loudly shaped had a "problem" I could only ever talk about in oblique and miserable and ashamed ways, something I refused to even think about, something I hated myself with all my heart for: I masturbated, and occasionally when I was really evil I looked at furry porn while I did so. Straight furry porn, incidentally. I actively looked away from sexualized male nudity even while curating a gallery of longingly portrayed bare-chested male figures covered in a safe layer of fur. Never once, across hundreds of thousands of words of writing as a teenager in public and in private, did I write directly, openly, or honestly about anything to do with romance or sexuality. I hated that the world was so sexualized and people were so obsessed with sex and romance and relationships. I called myself asexual to put a nice, tidy lock on that door. Anyway, all of this resolved into a comprehensible shape when I realized that I was gay and hadn't realized it as a kid, that I was desperately lonely and was romanticizing my own loneliness, and that the Mormon framework I honestly practiced and honestly loved had made me internalize that I was a monster. My current best model for what happened is: "I made the monster a wolf, and I made it beautiful, and I loved it when I couldn't love myself." But for about seven years in the middle, my basic answer to this question was something like "I was basically asexual towards humans, I eventually noticed I could be attracted to a few people, most of those people happen to be men, it's cool that I was capable of loving someone after all, and the wolf thing was a weird obsession rooted in a sexual fetish." And I think that answer was actually badly wrong, in that it was its own sort of cope. I still think werewolves are hot, to be clear. My model updated – I think my attraction towards men was basically innate, and the wolf obsession is what it looked like when that came out sideways – but the underlying sexual appeal hasn't disappeared. But when I look at the role wolves played for me as a teenager, they were essentially a container for all the parts of myself that I couldn't find expression for as a lonely, obedient, miserable, devout Mormon kid. My school assignments about wolves in Yellowstone and my nice wall art of a wolf in a forest and the recurring "you are a wolf in a cage GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT" motif in my artistic output were not fetishistic. They were me – the emotional, aesthetic, identity-entangled frame I was drawn towards – while the kid I was was busy subconsciously solving the impossible problem of how to be a gay Mormon kid who hates gay people. Anyway. I don't know how all of this maps onto the life of self-described autogynephiles. My guess is that for many, though perhaps not for Ray, "you're trans, you have deep-felt values that make you resist the idea of transitioning or leaning into the common frames around transition, and a scientific-sounding model that accounts for the part you're most ashamed of and lets you do the hard work of facing it down candidly" is probably more parsimonious than "this reduces to a sexual fetish." But that's a guess, an extrapolation from an experience that only partially maps. People are complicated, and I spent long enough being wrong about myself that I hold guesses about others lightly. "Trans" is its own reductive analytic map onto that underlying experiential core, of course. But I think people should look for ennobling self-presentations, ones that sketch out something they want rather than landing as a diagnosis of a problem they have. If you want and feel drawn to identify with specific feminine things, think of yourself in a way that centers the parts of that that feel truest to who you want to be, not the parts that keep you tied to the dark corners where you hate yourself. "Man who feels drawn to femininity" is also a fine self-concept. There are many maps of similar territory. But the choice of map does matter. I don't think pseudo-medical identities like "autogynephile" ennoble the soul or capture truths others cannot. They carry a weight of scientific confidence almost no observational, symptom-based psychiatric labels deserve, and they medicalize an experience that is fundamentally human rather than fundamentally medical. In particular, the label allows an identity of being the one to face down hard truths honestly, of being the one in the category-people-hate who will say the things about the category that politeness and prudence lead others to avoid. That's a real function, but it's not the one people who choose the word think it's filling. All that said, I am confident that whatever role femininity fulfills for Ray, he's completely correct that spending all his energy crushing it a) was never going to work and b) was an effort to kill one of the most vital and honest parts of himself, even if it was incompatible with values he honestly holds. I hope his path goes well from here, and I'm glad he's presenting it earnestly in public even as his position evolves and he risks embarrassment and mockery from multiple angles for doing so. And I don't think "autogynephile" is the best or most accurate word for what he is, even if in its own strange way it's a comforting one.

@tracewoodgrains @wesyang No, the metaphor is inapt. 1st bc you can’t “live in such a way” that makes you into a citizen. You either have that legal status or you don’t. 2nd, it’s inapt bc US citizenship is a potentially changeable legal status. But physical/historical facts aren’t changeable.

@tracewoodgrains @wesyang I don’t think the metaphor of “immigrants to a country are citizens” works. You can’t recreate yourself as a birthright US citizen if you were born + live elsewhere, no matter how much you walk/dress/sound like an American. Even sincere desire can’t change that history.

I don't disagree that someone with XY chromosomes, testes, etc etc is descriptively male. I disagree that someone with predominantly estrogenized secondary sex characteristics, who is drawn persistently to feminine self-expression in a lifelong way, who makes a persistent commitment to live and be seen as a woman, is or should be treated as a man. Trans women are women: not in the sense of having a female development pattern, of course, as the trans people who actively seek out all sorts of interventions for that would be the first to note, but in much the same sense as immigrants to a country are citizens. "Trans woman" is a much more specific and useful descriptor for someone than "man." Or we could just go for the wisdom of 4chan philosophers, though since I'm not straight I'd have to reverse the polarity.

@megbasham @anneapplebaum What’s happening here?

@anneapplebaum Have any on record sources yet? Like someone who saw him out clearly intoxicated somewhere? Or a single piece of hard documentation like a calendar showing missed meetings or an email or a record showing his security detail requesting the breaching equipment? Anything?

"I stand by every single word of this report...I have been inundated by additional sourcing going up to the highest levels of the government, thanking us for doing the work, providing additional corroborating information." Sarah Fitzpatrick on Kash Patel: theatlantic.com/podcasts/2026/…

JOHN KORIR JUST TOOK A MINUTE OFF THE COURSE RECORD!! 2:01:52 FOR THE WIN IN BOSTON!! WOW!!!! 🤯 Tune into the CITIUS MAG Watchalong: youtube.com/live/EF0bg5zCr…

It is bonkers to claim that “no established relationship exists between SRY status and performance”. This conflicts with a massive amount of evidence and, if it were true, would undermine the rationale for women’s sport.

A major flaw in the “Bullshit Jobs” thesis is confusing “adversarial” with “unnecessary.” Many adversarial roles appear zero- or even negative-sum at the micro level, but are positive-sum at the macro level. Litigation, compliance, auditing, and other apparently zero-sum activities often provide the enforcement, information, and deterrence that make rule-of-law and market institutions possible. A breach-of-contract suit is usually negative-sum for the parties in that one case. But a world in which contracts cannot be credibly enforced is far worse. The same is true of many forms of institutional friction: they look like deadweight if you isolate the transaction, but they are part of the scaffolding that lets the larger system function. Adversarial systems generate information, constrain discretion, and reduce corruption in ways that are easy to miss if you look only at the immediate transaction. Central planning rested in part on the assumption that many such adversarial processes were wasteful and could be replaced by administrative decision-making. That proved disastrous: you lose the information generated by decentralized contestation and create enormous room for corruption by the people making the decisions. Graeber’s mistake was often Chesterton’s Fence: seeing a role whose purpose was not immediately obvious to him and inferring that it therefore had no purpose. Maybe some jobs really are padded or performative, but many others exist because they form the scaffolding that keeps the systems running.

@rwlesq @HistoryBoomer Very smartly stated.

@JonahDispatch Pre-crime detected.

Zoë staring daggers at me from upstairs window as I load car.

“Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Thumb guy took out the luggage again. Zoe’s so mad she wouldn’t eat breakfast and just went upstairs to watch the dog TV. I did get extra treats and belly rubs tho. I’m over the trauma of the Chester attack. Also, I love you.”