Our foreign policy presently consists of 1) “vamp until someone else solves the problem for us” and 2) “everyone knows that the price of commodities like oil are set according to global supply and demand; what we presuppose is — maybe they aren’t?”

If he were even fractionally less malevolent than he actually is, the bottomless well of neediness and self-absorption that is Donald Trump would actually evoke some pathos and sympathy

to disappoint in advance i'm pretty serious about blue-no-matter-who at the moment and yeah that includes whichever Even That Guy you happened to have in mind for all Even That Guys of whom i currently have knowledge. that does not however mean you pull punches during the primary

goddammit cubs

It's weird how there's been a backlash against "slop" without a corresponding revival in high culture. I see approximately 60,000 posts bemoaning "slop" for every post about opera or ballet or literature above the YA level.

so when i mute the phrase “harry potter” do i need to put quote marks around the words or how does that work

We got people walking out of jail while turning the PIN pad to the DOJ to ask them how much of a tip they want to leave

circling back to what i said about villains, there's a corollary of it that there's no obvious way to make a choice that is meaningful without it striking at least some members of the audience as justified

Facebook serving me help wanted ads for schools that are SLIGHTLY outside of my preferred commuting range

Want to feel old? All the teenagers who used to email Rockstar Games asking why you can't shoot dogs in Grand Theft Auto now work for the federal government

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living... just like high prices! Free yourself from the shackle of overpriced goods, the proletariat emancipation SALE is HAPPENING NOW!

In this makeshift encampment outside the abandoned ruins of what was once Dayton, Ohio, Saturdays are for Buckeye football, Sunday brunch means sending out armed foragers to look under rocks for edible grubs, and any day is a good day for the dwindling band of survivors to envy the dead

I think a lot about how it is clear Trump does not have a single genuinely loving person in his life that will intervene. Not one. That’s a hell of a legacy.

Conspiracy theories are core to the operation of nearly every totalitarian and authoritarian nightmare in existence, and it's up to us to beat them back. We can have a country worth living in, or we can have our politics consist chiefly of conspiracy theorizing. One. Or the other. Choose well.

if we’re gonna speedrun the Iraq War you young people are gonna need to read Theory

are there any more things like this

istg some people on here need, like, an after-poasting drop-in center with a basketball hoop and a dance dance revolution and caring adults who will rap with you about your problems and dispense sage advice like “you fucked up, stop fucking up, doubling down isn’t getting you out of this.”

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS ANTIMATTER

i just find it hard to look at the last twenty years and believe that bullying is good, effective political praxis. sorry

l’arte dello clickbait

My two-point plan for giving Democrats a healthier relationship to the act of voting: 1) tactical voting is Good, Actually and you should do it 2) jfc get over yourselves

Just thinking about my favorite building to drive past on 90 Seeing that for sale sign go up is genuinely the funniest thing ever

To borrow another poster’s language, this vast expenditure is being done for no clear reason beyond the belief that it’s penis to get energy from fire and vagina to get energy from not-fire

Iran policy is the obvious canary in the coal mine here—we need to secure the Strait of Hormuz because in reality a prolonged closure would be catastrophic but we have to secure it NONCHALANTLY because acting urgently would mean that the initial bombing was…suboptimal

“Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu have some dopey opinions, maybe Gamergate was right” no. Shut the fuck up

the sign, i tap him again

I'm sure there's a good reason why today's spate of announcements that people on bluesky dot app are going attack formation gamma against people they mostly agree with substantively but not aesthetically is different from previous such spates but, still, wake me up when I need to give a shit

Hypothesis: we still have not made things square with the Flayed Lord

Devastating because they’re implying that we are a) a satan and b) not one of the better-known satans

It has been almost a week since the IL-09 primary and I would like to once again extend a warm invitation for everyone to strongly consider beginning to be normal about the IL-09 primary

COINTELAMATEUR

It was Bad, Actually when the cool mean leftists decided that the idea that Russia may have interfered in the 2016 election was wineboss girlmom cringe for libs in denial about how Hillary was the worst candidate possible ever.

Not for the last time I am compelled to ask why people with money and power beyond the imagination of ordinary schmucks like me seem to genuinely feel incomplete without being sincerely admired by a cadre of dorkwad Posters whose main distinguishing feature is being huge racists

The especially wild thing is that racism is the only bedrock belief that isn’t a direct knock-on effect of his extreme self-absorption, his other three core beliefs being 1) It’s good when people give me Presents 2) Everyone should be talking about me always and 3) People should be Fair…

Honestly, Donald Trump is probably more racist than George Wallace ever was. Wallace was an opportunist who embraced racist politics because it played well with his electorate. Trump is a true believer in racism who keeps saying racist things despite the political blowback.

To be fair, it is a massive logistical hassle to get all the way to the White House from the arena in DC which is (checks map) a little less than a mile away

oh.

“Good evening, I’m Leonard Pinth-Garnell, and this is Bad Great-Power Geopolitics. Tonight we have something grievously ill-advised for you.”

In kind of the same way that a huge portion of the job of flight attendants is training and prepping for emergencies they may never actually experience, every librarian has secretly prepped for years for the moment they have to tell some officious government weasel to sit and spin

Both McNeese State and Wright State ultimately fell short of bolstering the folk wisdom of Always Picking A State That Isn't A State in the first round

I went to college in Waukegan, Illinois so I mostly teleported to the 24 hour taqueria on McAree but I suspect the same basic mechanics were in place here

I don’t recognize the song being played in this store but I strongly suspect it’s from a concept album and the concept was “what if Steely Dan sucked shit?”

If you and your Computer Friends have talked each other into a firm belief that Daniel Fucking Biss is some sort of right-wing Manchurian Candidate or even a centrist, well, I can’t tell you what to believe but I owe it to you to let you know you sound insane.

I don’t have anything particularly interesting or notable to say about either LLMs or Graham Platner, which is an unfortunate point to concede here on the Website Where We Only Talk About LLMs and Graham Platner

This place has EVERYTHING. Douchebags, moderately functional autistic people, moderately functional autistic people who are also douchebags, Roman J. Israel Esquire...

the Classics

Having a mental model of the world that divides everything and everyone into either a Good bucket or a Bad bucket is good for Engagement but extremely bad for Understanding How Things Actually Work

A popular leftist voter guide for the Illinois primary regarded politicians who supported a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine as unacceptably pro-Zionist, which I think has some relevance to the question of how people are perceiving the issue.

What happened in the Illinois primaries is not a huge win for AIPAC and it’s also not a humiliating debacle for insurgent progressive candidates and if people are telling you to believe things like this you should be asking why they want you to believe things that aren’t true

It really is remarkable, when you step back and observe from a distance, how much people in online political communities are driven by seething envy and resentment of people who are nominally on the same team but get more attention than they do