I'm able to watch TikTok on my desktop computers using Safari (and Chrome).

And the embedded Rand Paul video from yesterday is displayed in the blog post, even on my phone, and it plays. Screenshot from the phone, made just now:

Is something changing or were browsers never shut off? I don't know.

I'm reading and listening to "Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening."

This is an interview in the NYT (free access link to the edited transcript/I listened to the full audio in the NYT audio app). Here's an excerpt. The boldface is the interviewer David Marchese:

You’re not willing to say that there were aspects of political life in the era of kings that were inferior or provided less liberty for people than political life does today? You did a thing that people often do where they confuse freedom with power. Free speech is a freedom. The right to vote is a form of power. So the assumption that you’re making is that through getting the vote in the early 20th century in England and America, women made life better for themselves.

Do you think it’s better that women got the vote? I don’t believe in voting at all.

Do you vote? No. Voting basically enables you to feel like you have a certain status. “What does this power mean to you?” is really the most important question. I think that what it means to most people today is that it makes them feel relevant. It makes them feel like they matter. There’s something deeply illusory about that sense of mattering that goes up against the important question of: We need a government that is actually good and that actually works, and we don’t have one.

It's January 19th. Do you know where your children are?

Dave Chappelle does the opening monologue on "Saturday Night Live."

Here it is, from last night, all 17 minutes:

Taking down TikTok punched a hundred holes in my blog.

Where I had embedded video yesterday, it now looks like this:

Every post that had an embedded TikTok video now looks empty like that and is missing its point. Every post where I linked to anything on TikTok has been turned — forcibly, by our government — into something that would not be posted.

I watched a lot of TikTok yesterday, so I saw how many many TikTok creators were saying goodbye to the audience they had drawn in over the years, and now, this morning, I'm seeing mainstream media articles about how these last goodbyes sounded. The NYT has the headline "In TikTok’s Final Hours, a Mix of Silliness and Sadness." And that headline made me angry, because I didn't see "silliness." I saw sadness, but the other thing I saw was outright anger — anger at the American government for shutting down a medium of free individual speech that was an important part of life for tens of millions of Americans. Even if much of TikTok could be labeled "silly," even silly speech matters — seriously — when the government comes and takes it away.