You’re dealing with a power player in the Ottawa area Asian fusion vegan ghost kitchen scene. I would advise you tread lightly, friend.

You meet the love of your life but then she leaves you one day for her weird ex who is always writing about elves

I do *not* think that Mitt Romney was unfairly maligned: he ran for president, politics is a contact sport, & he gave as good as he got. But I do think that a certain kind of relatively low-info person on both the right & left doesn’t grasp just how big the gap between someone like him & Trump

fucking calling bullshit on this ‘eldritch city of unknowable incomprehensible entities beyond time’ dude. I see stairs. no way are they that incomprehensible if there’s stairs.

Had to explain to a pair of cops again that I was drinking a non-alcoholic beer after a run and thus not breaking open container laws (I didn’t know they had them here?), this time a pair of surly SDQ officers who I’m pretty sure used the words ‘CrossFit’ when discussing me among themselves.

If Trump has a heart attack or something similar in office and we see people partying in the street, outrage over those images is gonna define right wing politics for a long time.

when computer people say something has a ‘simple solution’ half the time it’s “change two things in system settings” and the other half it’s “first, install Linux”

“Evil corrupt theocracy that is also 100% right about the evil demons” is a funnily common setting in genre fiction, but most of it doesn’t really acknowledge this sort of tension. “Yeah man, my bad about like casting our lot in with the Ruinous Powers thing. Fr tho, how was I supposed to know!”

it is so important to have this conversation.

You expect WASPs to care about places that are against their own existence? Sorry if I don't care about places like Penis Hut where I might get 360 no-scoped for being myself.

If you’re interested in how 2024 non-voters broke, this is to my knowledge the state of the art at present in terms of size and data quality.

this is a recurring discourse epistemological problem I think in that unpleasant right wingers are just stupid and/or bigoted, unpleasant lefties are often crazy in a way that’s can sometimes be kind of stimulating to interact with. so they get signal boosted and inform perceptions of the left more.

I find a lot of popularism discourse sort of stupid because America has a pretty open primary system,and if candidates that are more centrist on abortion can win, then they will. But everyone acts like there’s some central committee of pundits that has to say yes/no first and bless the whole thing

I wonder what the stupidest thing you could meme into existence on right wing twitter and thus White House policy is. If you got the right people posting about it could probably get them to believe that Feta Cheese made you Trans.

If they're going to try and retcon Charlie Kirk, then we should try to retcon him too.

there are unpleasant people on both here and X who will pop into your mentions but on here they're mainly just people doing that 2018-2020 left twitter thing where they do a weird impression of a high school bully and on there it's republican congressional candidates and/or literal nazis

Solidly 99 percent of the people fuming at this post are making some... bad assumptions about the views of people who did not vote in 2024

in principle an entire nuanced discussion to be had about what the appropriate use of demographic characteristics in things like admissions, with many grey areas. that is not the actual debate as it exists in the real world, that is "should Black people be allowed to be Drs" and their answer is "no"

I have no idea what the actual data shows, but my purely subjective experience does not jive at all with the "bluesky is dying" narrative.

the funny thing about the constant misappropriation of MLK is that the guy left a massive body of writing specifically aimed at explaining his views of those of the movement he represented to the broad public. it is extremely easy to know what the guy thought on a variety of subjects and yet

My favorite Rod Dreher moment was when a billionaire single-handedly funded his column with the condition that he be subject to no editorial scrutiny at all, then got upset when it was weird.

yeah people who work professionally in politics can’t say this for a variety of reasons, but I’m just some guy so I can: by now the data shows that Trump has a lot of marginal low-turnout voter support, persuading them to *not vote* is basically as good as getting them to switch.

Is there any kind of theory for why anti-Indian racism went so nuts relative to before over the past 24 months? Collapsing CS degree job market?

guys Trump won the popular vote ‘some Trump supporters need to be persuaded’ is like trivially true, this a dumb sentiment to get upset about

there's never been a better time than right now to get lincolnpilled. well i guess 1858 or so would have been pretty good too but since then

Friends dog is verified on Instagram. the dog isn’t making the posts…what is the point of verification. are they worried about the wrong corgi account pitching scams

dems don’t need to throw minority groups like trans people ‘under the bus’, but not really for a reason anyone on here will like: things are getting bad enough quick enough that a much more palatable position to the median voter of “we won’t actively persecute you’ will soon be enough for activists

I definitely have become way more elitist in that there just clearly are people who without their participation in civic life somehow filtered through intermediaries go full medieval peasant. Like they need their local newspaper, their union, etc. to render modernity legible to them.

Extremely causal and ignorant football watcher but I thought Bill Bellicheck was supposed to be some kind of like, dark god of coaching. Is he just washed?

I never really thought that I would feel like I’m living in “the future”, like I just assumed that things would gradually change over time like they always have. But it’s sort of funny because post some point in like 2020-21 I actually have had a lot of “whoa I live in the future” type moments.

Not really unfortunately. States have policy latitude when it comes to undocumented populations in that they can decide how much they’re gonna cooperate with ICE, but high-skill immigration is mostly an aboveboard thing, working for employers that file W-2s, etc.

"slopulism" is another good one in this vein

I'm actually gonna lay down a marker on the H1B shit: they're gonna chicken out. it won't go into effect in its current form (at $100k per H1B). I think they quietly lose a lawsuit and forget about it or walk it back. doesn't mean no bullshit on H1Bs, probably something, but not this exact thing.

a project I did with a law firm was several months of the most tense, adversarial, and needlessly hostile workplace I have ever experienced in my life, followed by them wanting to hang out and get drunk like we were buddies. lawyers are strange.

the H1B policy is insane immoral national suicide policy but probably will be short term good for people like me in terms of career prospects before the underlying industries we work in like higher ed or medicine fucking collapse.

this was summer ‘24… MAYBE THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN A GOOD IDEA TO HAVE SOME HEADLINES ABOUT THIS IN THE FUCKING FALL OF 2024, MERICK. MAYBE THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN HELPFUL.

the odds that JD Vance and Stancil unknowingly interacted in circa 2010 in EVE or somewhere similar have got to be north of at least 20%

The extremely limited “gotta hand it to ‘em” that I will give this guy is that this is 300x the intellectual humility and self-reflection that other TPOT people have shown over shit like DOGE.

Another entry in the "critics of liberalism assumed it was eternal and therefore could be criticized, subverted, and undermined harmlessly" files. Many such cases. Including a younger starfish who deserved an asskicking.

‘Cyberpunk is now a retro future like 50s scifi’ is a take that I disagree with, I think. Some of the little more hackish stuff that treated it just as a pure aesthetic, sure. But I think there’s a lot of contemporary stuff in the genre that resonates with the current moment very well.

yeah I think this is a good metaphor for the tension between people who do longer term activism and the more normie types who join in moments of unrest and momentum like the present. warriors who regard the conflict as a part of their identity, vs. soldiers who want to win and fucking go home.

wow he has an extremely millennial half-clever lowbrow-highbrow username exactly like this account's. Jesus, I'm a fuckin' type of guy aren't I. I've been guy-typed.

a childhood kinda-friend who had an indie skate shop, then tech consultant, then went to grad school for a MSW, is evidently a Hegelian leftist influencer on instagram now.

corollary to "personnel is policy" worth more empirical testing/theorizing: "policy is personnel"" meaning that certain types of people are attracted to certain types of jobs, & that by changing the type of work done, you can change the type of personnel, & the nature of agency, without law change

I will never vote for a fuckin' grassie. water and fire type made this country, I don't care if it's politically correct to say.

I used to see Corbyn as the UK Sanders, but it's become increasingly clear that while Jeremy is a very lovely well-intentioned person, he does not have Bernie's actually good at politics juice.

normally I find UK politics pretty legible but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't becoming increasingly incomprehensible to me the last few months. so this is the new party that Corbyn is attempting to launch. It's called "Your Party" (why?), and it's apparently already having infighting issues?

being told at the end of the trial as part of the disclosure process that that your entire reality was created to have a control group for this trial. an IRB 65 years in the future (not your future) approved. so, you go to the placebo. sign here please, here's your $400.

most effective way to monetize access to alternate timelines would probably be their cultural content. movies, books, etc. raw materials are hard to transport, bur content easy to get back to your timeline and it's not like copyright law applies across quantum probabilities.

Of all the stupid things that this regime has done, this is right up near the top. Postdoctoral researchers come to the US on H-1B visas. This will further destroy the US science enterprise. Stupid stupid stupid.