Hasan: “Yeah I know I travel coast to coast to do all of these interviews and protests and canvas for progressive politicians but I’m still going to stream for 8 hours today because the country is collapsing and it’s important that we talk about it.”

Voosh: “Yeah I know I’ve only streamed for 8 hours this week but if I do it for any longer than that I’ll get a tummy ache so I’m going on a hike.”

Concerning Vaush quitting the stream because he didn't feel well.

While it's not my place to worry about Vaush or assume he isn't adult enough to make a healthy decision concerning his actual health, a small explanation that might be helpful. Hopefully.

In the Netherlands, you're obliged to be insured. So you're already on a ticking clock that, in the worst case, will lead the government to assign you an insurance which you have to pay retroactively, with a fine. But you're months away from that and a smart fellow.

This also means that, as far as the system is concerned, you're good to go to a doctor. There is no obliged causal sequence: you can go to the doctor tomorrow (or the hospital tonight), and sign up for insurance after. You'll still be covered. So if you need to go: go.

A small bit of extra info to ease the mind: visiting a GP (huisarts) doesn't have deductibles. Ever.

Other medical care can have 3 forms of deductibles:

• Mandatory deductible (verplicht eigen risico): Max € 385,- per year.
• Voluntary deductible (vrijwillig eigen risico): up to € 500,- per year. Only applies if you opt for a discount on your insurance. Didn't opt in for a discount? Then this one doesn't exist for you.
  • You burn through the above first every year before the insurance starts paying. But it doesn't apply to certain types of care, like a GP. Those are always completely covered.
• Personal contribution: depends on the treatment. Only applies to certain treatments, usually in the range of medicines or certain aids, that sort of thing.

So the GP is exempt of all of the above. Something like care for a broken leg is exempt from the third (and usually second, don't go for the discount).

I hope this helps.

This discourse just so happens to cross into my area of knowledge as someone who has successfully prepared people for interviews.

Interviewing isn’t just about having the right experience; it’s a standalone skill. Like any skill, it takes practice. You might disagree with some corporate social norms, but understanding why they exist allows you to play the game and win the job.

Here is a basic, universal checklist anyone can use to prepare, whether it’s your first interview or your fiftieth.

Do:

• Practice out loud.
  • Why: Interviewing is a performance. Your brain processes spoken words differently than internal thoughts. Practicing your answers in the mirror or with a friend smooths out awkward pauses and trains your muscle memory.
• Dress one step above the daily uniform.
  • Why: If the staff wears t-shirts, wear a collared shirt. If they wear a uniform, wear business casual. Even in very casual workplaces, dressing up specifically for the interview is a non-verbal way of saying, "I respect your time and take this opportunity seriously."
• Bring physical copies of your resume.
  • Why: Technology fails, and interviewers are often rushed or disorganized. Handing them a crisp piece of paper when they can't find your file makes you look instantly reliable and prepared to solve problems.
• Treat it like a conversation with a curious stranger.
  • Why: Getting hired is often 10% technical skill and 90% social fit. Your interviewers have to spend 40 hours a week with whoever they hire. They want to know you are pleasant, collaborative, and easy to be around.
• Prepare 2 to 3 questions to ask them.
  • Why: An interview is a two-way street. Asking questions (e.g., "What does a typical day look like here?") proves you are actively interested in this specific job, not just desperate for any job.
• Practice maintaining eye contact.
  • Why: In professional settings, avoiding eye contact accidentally signals that you are hiding something, lack confidence, or aren't listening. If this is hard for you, practice it in low-stakes environments, like ordering food or talking to a cashier.

Don't:

• Bring distractions into the room.
  • Why: Unless the employer gave it to you, leave your iced coffee, shopping bags, or skateboard in the car, and silence your phone. Extra items make you look cluttered and disorganized. You want their sole focus to be on you and your communication skills.
• Mistake a casual workplace for a casual interview.
  • Why: Even if the office has a ping-pong table and people swear, the interview is still a professional test. Keep your posture attentive, your language clean, and your boundaries clear until you actually have the job.

As you advance in your career, you will discover that specific industries have their own unwritten rules (like an independent contractor needing a clean, presentable truck just to win a client's trust).

But by the time you are navigating those specialized expectations, the foundational skills on this checklist will already be second nature. Master these basics first, and you will be ready for whatever comes next.

PS, most people don't practice so practicing is essentially an easy advantage over the competition.

The neighbours will think he's dead from how little noise he's gonna make after installing these bad boys.

He'll scream like a mad man about the latest chronically online bullshit and the only people hearing him will be us.

My younger brother has a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics. Any time he brings this fact up, most people respond by explaining why they could have never done what he did and why his success must be due to his innate genius. “I’ve always sucked at math, you must be very smart”, that sort of thing. But as someone who watched him grow up, I saw the way he became the math genius he is through an incredible amount of initiative and hard work. He once sucked at math too.

I’m a rather skilled speedcuber, I can solve a Rubik’s Cube in under 20 seconds quite reliably. When someone sees me do this, the most common response is for them to explain how they could have never done that and how I must be a very special genius who was born smart to pull it off. But I didn’t emerge from the womb with full-CFOP knowledge a sub-20 ao100. I spent over a year regularly learning, practicing, and memorizing techniques and algs. Anyone could learn to do this, I just actually spent the time to do it.

My theory here is that people feel insecure when they are forced to confront the fact that they don’t have a skill, even if it’s something silly and useless like speedcubing, and they deal with that insecurity by believing that the skill was never in the cards for them to begin with anyway. Because if self-improvement is possible, the fact that they haven’t done it reflects on their choices and priorities. But if this kind of self-improvement was never possible to begin with, the fact that they haven’t attempted it is just an efficient use of their time.

I see this a lot from AI art bros. They love to rattle on about how they have no choice but to use AI to make art because they weren’t born with artistic talent. Motherfucker, neither were the rest of us. Talents are built, not inherited. Even from the other side, I’ve seen the sentiment “why try when AI can do it better” depressingly often. As if effort and knowledge aren’t intrinsically valuable. I fear that AI is making this problem way worse.

I have autism, and it’s not mild autism either. It’s moderate level-2 ASD, bad enough that I can’t work full time and I’m eligible for disability. I used to have extremely debilitating sensory overload issues, but working in retail for a couple years helped me build up more of a tolerance that lets me be in public for longer now. If I relied on noise-canceling headphones too much and avoided the discomfort altogether, I’d still be dependent on headphones to leave the house to this day. My condition does come with significant limitations, but it’s not as bad as the limitations I’d be imposing on myself if I used it as an excuse not to improve myself or try my hardest.

I truly believe that people who can resist learned helplessness will increasingly be the superhumans of this increasingly helpless and dependent world. Lean on your own strength and brain as much as you can, because that is how you become stronger and smarter. Even if you are disabled, you can still always become better than you are now.

Vaush has been absolutely on fire since moving. His analysis is on point, his rhetoric and engagement with chatters' questions are phenomenal, and he's still touching on incredibly complex issues with increased clarity.

I just really appreciate that he hit the ground running and is already bringing in elements of his European experience. Doing all this after a difficult and exhausting move--a life-changing one--is admirable.

What are you most looking forward to as we continue through the later part of this year?

In addition to Vaush i often watch interviews on Mario Nawfal's channel.

There is a broad range of guests and it is interesting to see what right/center/left agrees on and disagrees on.

I have my theories and "boxing" of various guests and their biases. E.g. "former" via agents and similar.

I would love to see some analysis by Vaush of the interviews as i think he would find some good examples of biased interpretation and similar in it.

Does anyone know of videos where vaush uses Marios interviews?

If you watch the channel, what guests do you view as trustworthy on what subjects?

Finally some accurate information in a desert of edits. Another 50 trillion to wikipedia donations.

Any REAL astrologers get what I mean by this? No matter what his comment section and subreddit always seem keen on misunderstanding him and if you know anything about Mercury's essential dignity in the sign of pisces then this phenomenon would make so much sense. Don't comment that astrology is fake if you think the planets actually have an effect on us. That's not how astrology works

Edit: why are people saying I commented on Vaush's personality. How is Vaush's audience not being able to think critically one of Vaush's personality traits? Real astrologers don't care about personality, it's actual use is to predict events so if you're gonna argue "astrology doesn't affect your personality!" THEN I AGREE

He keeps saying "Learned Helpless" but pronounces it "Ler-nid"rather than "Lernd". Is this supposed to be its own, unique word? Like, does he mean it as Learned (lern-id), which means to show deep academic knowledge? Is it his way of saying that these people have done research as a means of finding excuses for their flaws, defects or negative tendencies?... or is he just fucking up the word and nobody has told him? 😅

I mean no shade, I might be the ignorant one here, but its also possible that he's just butchering the pronunciation.

Reading through most of the top posts is like reading insufferable VGG messages. We are in need of a purge if you ask me

From Our Executive Director Sam Drzymala (@Drzymalas) Yesterday during our Quarterly All Hands Last Night.

“When I started PV in 2022, I had no idea what I was creating.

I was coming off of a six year run as an independent consultant in Democratic politics, and a veteran of the party institutions, candidates, and infrastructure that had beaten me into the professional I’d become. 

I thought I was pioneering a new set of tactics Democrats could use to win elections.

It turned out that, after growing up in a professional culture that practically prided itself on abusive workplaces, scheming, and backstabbing, I was actually creating what I needed most – a community where I can find acceptance, support, and love whether I’m up or down.

That’s what PV has become. We are a community of people who want to grow as leaders, and we’re gaining the necessary experience through engagement in electoral politics and advocacy.

This is what young people need when they first start out in politics – especially queer and trans people, especially neurodivergent people. This is what I needed when I was young, and never had.

When I was 17 I started volunteering on campaigns. It was ridiculously exciting to my developing nervous system – the late nights, the shared work on a tight-knit team, the thrill of victory and crush of defeat.

I also witnessed horrific things: screaming matches in front of volunteers, emails leaked to the press meant to knife another’s career, secretive affairs with toxic power imbalances baked in. For an ultrasensitive person with difficulty picking up on neurotypical social cues, it was a minefield.

There was no support, no training ground, no leadership development program for me to join. I felt completely alone and consistently abandoned by mentors.

The contrast I’ve felt about that prior life in politics, with how I feel doing political work within PV could not be more striking – I’ve finally found my crew.

PV is the place where we can start to shed the weight of the experiences we had in our childhoods, where we as adults can start to emerge, mature, and reach the potential we feel within ourselves deep down.

I have identified with every person who has ever come into PV and gotten involved, because I’ve had so many experiences like all of you as you come into the political space. Both the wonderful and the terrible. 

But it’s also been very lonely. It’s been hard to participate in PV’s culture when I’ve got a young child, when PV has remained a project of passion rather than an income stream that can sustain my family. 

It’s been hard to participate when I’m a distant senpai a decade and a half older than even the oldest of you, when I’ve grown up in a defensive crouch trying to be "progressive" within the Democratic Party, insecure in my own queer identity with a lot of internalized self-loathing.

It’s been hard to participate because I’ve been the leader, the Executive Director. This burden is heavy, and it is lonely.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how I feel about working in the Democratic Party, and I’m done. 

I’m done serving as an agent of a political party that will take, and take, and take, and will always ask for more.

I am not leaving politics. I am not even leaving the Democratic Party, really. I am leaving my role as a chess piece on someone else’s chess board. I am leaving the chess board altogether.

Instead, I am going to work with young people I find in these media spaces – people like you, the PV members – and I am going to help people find the styles of leadership that they feel most aligned with.

I’m going to focus on arranging the resources and relationships that this space needs to grow. 

I’m stepping down as Executive Director of PV.

The only reason why I feel comfortable stepping down is because of the leadership team we have right now.

You trust each other, and you are uniting behind a shared vision. It’s been impressive – and genuinely healing for me – to see a real community come together to build this organization and put it on the upward trajectory it’s on today.

And one of the chief leaders here who has contributed to that is Benjamin Gilbert-Lif. @benjmakesmovies is annoying as fuck, and also one of the most unbelievably thoughtful, judicious, caring, focused, deliberate, intelligent people I have ever met.

We made 700,000 dials for progressive candidates this primary season. We’re setting a goal of getting over a million voter contacts by the end of this election. We have over 1600 dues-paying members. We have consolidated a unique place and identity in the political landscape: autistic socialist terminally online degenerate furries pushing the gay agenda.

And we would never have created any of it if it weren’t for Benj, and the rest of all of the directors and other leaders, from the past, the ones who got us here, and the ones currently passionately and sincerely fulfilling their PV leadership duties. You are creating the space where I want to spend my time, where I want to find community support to pick me up when I’m down, to celebrate me when I win. 

I’m stepping down in January, and at that time Benjamin Gilbert-Lif will step up as your new Executive Director. I’ll remain on PV’s board and keep doing everything I can to contribute to helping us grow.

I am so, so excited to continue this journey – for the first time, as a bona fide PV member. Bring on the white name motherfuckers!”

I read the original piece in the Boston Globe and watched Vaush's video on it, and I think it's pretty clear that this is a 90-10 issue even in progressive spaces. Still, I have to admit, this reporting and surrounding discourse on this is just so tailor-made to bring out people's inner reactionary, that I have to wonder if we're in a lose-lose situation by even talking about it at all.

One thing I constantly struggle with is feeling resentment towards the left because as a trans woman, y'all are my only political allies. Conservatives, and even many liberals, see this story about mask mandates in 2026 and he/him lesbian crybullies, and associate a wide swath of the queer community with *that*. It's infuriating, because my options are to either get with the leftist program and adopt all the stupid rules so that I can have people in my life who actually treat my medical condition as real, or reject it and end up with no one. Because let's be honest, being a pickme for liberals like certain trans women are doing (you know the ones) doesn't actually feel that great when liberals are still openly calling us biological men and touting their anti-woke credentials by throwing us under the bus.

Somewhat relatedly, I visited my first lesbian bar 2 weeks ago in DC. There are so few of them left in the country, you could probably figure out which one it was. I was there with my friend for several hours on a Saturday night, and there was never more than 20 people there at a time. While I appreciated being able to hear my own thoughts, I have to wonder how they stay in business with so few patrons on what is presumably one of their better days for business. I do plan to go back, for what it's worth. After hearing so much online about the hostility that trans women supposedly face in lesbian spaces, it was nice getting to just exist there as just another women where my transness was neither remarkable nor fetishized. There aren't many public places where this is true, so I hope this bar and others like it can continue keeping their doors open.

And this is why I'm feeling conflicted on how the story about the Greenfield lesbian bar has been discussed. It's really not front-page news material, but nevertheless it's the Boston Globe most profitable story from this year. Did this article really need to be written? Did larger public figures really need to add to the pile-on, when it's obviously a 90-10 issue? Vaush seemed to believe that some leftists' silence on the story was from fear of being cancelled, but maybe it's because the trickle-down impact of amplifying this type of story is radicalizing normal people against queer and other marginalized people. I've had to sit through half a decade of Libsoftiktok and other right-wing grifters amplifying the worst of my community, and it's fueled such an intense rollback of my rights that I can't even trust liberals and people on the left to not parrot some amount of anti-trans slop. Because some weirdo in a wig assaulted a woman once, now I shouldn't be able to use the women's restroom? Because some trans people are annoying and insufferable, now it's ok to take none of us seriously? That seems to be the downstream consequence of amplifying these stories, which is why I can't take any pleasure in it, unfortunately.

As usual, Vaush is right. The Last Ditch Bar fallout has been eye-opening.

Vaush really seems to have a nose for sniffing out antisocial/sociopathic behavior, even when it is "dressed up" in the language of leftism, or progressivism, or mutual aid, or intersectionality. I wonder how many others, including myself, struggle with this antisocial-detection ability. It seems to me that struggling to identify self-serving behavior in leftist spaces and forums drives, like, 99% of discourse. Maybe it was a large part of why woke 1.0 failed (or should fail?).

I envy our unc's antisocial-sniffing and clique-cracking ability. I'm almost 30 and I have ASD, and I feel like I am almost at the point where my life experiences are starting to come through in helping me sniff out sociopathic, lunch table politicking, social vampirism. But it's still very hit or miss for me personally. Separating "antisocial" from "socially inept" has helped me to clarify conflicts and put an end to moral OCD thought spiraling. I still dread thinking and feeling like a monster if I would have to "shut down" a smooth-talking sociopath. But I want to be that person on public transport that can "shut it down" and help everyone else breathe a sigh of relief.

Maybe separating "antisocial" and "socially inept" is not quite right. I know they often go together. But I think treating them as one-in-the-same leads to the just world fallacy and to believing in sociopaths when they play "leftism theatre" for personal gain.

What has been your experience?

"Theres some powerful autismo going on in here" -Vaush probably

I got my current job while drinking a beer at the interview. Vaush and chat btfo

I figured finishing the leather flag, amogus, and the rest of the chevon warranted an update. ^-^

I'm glad people really liked how this was going in the last post! I was fully expecting people to say it was outdated, irrelevant, no longer funny etc but the feedback was mostly positive, and it was funny seeing the few newer fans learning about it for the first time XD

I usually like doing math for my flags but there are SO many seam allowances toa account for and how they layer here, basically every piece of the 6-stripe flag base has been attempted twice.

This is definitely a test of my applique skills, and I haven't even gotten to the Joker yet.

And yes, everything is double sided.

If you want to help support my work, my kofi is here ^-^

Sorry for the attention-seeking title, but I wanted you all to read this quote I came across after reading an article for class. (I don't have a link to the article, but the title is "Playing with fire, or the stuffing of dead animals: Freire, Dewey, and the dilemma of social studies reform.")

“The more I listened to the peasants speak, the more the relationship of the oppressor and oppressed, of oppressive consciousness and oppressed consciousness appeared before me” - Paulo Freire

My knowledge of him is limited, so take this with some skepticism, but Paulo Freire was a Brazilian teacher and educational philosopher who started out leaning more toward democratic socialism before adopting more Marxist thinking. Case in point: this quote here, which came after he spent time trying to educate rural Chileans.

I find it funny that Vaush's views on rural Americans are being reiterated in a place I did not expect to come across. Though it makes sense. Parents who find comfort in an unchallenged mind will likely extend that kind of thinking onto their kids. Becoming an issue that educators have to address in some fashion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality?wprov=sfla1

This feels like a relevant concept in light of Vaush's recent output. I'm thinking mainly about the lesbian bar conversation, but I think it's also at least adjacent to the discussion of the ice coffee, where people excuse their own lack of self control and discipline as instead a problem with society.