God damn it is undeniable how many people just outright hate AI. I don’t think any technology in history has ever revolted so many people in such a public and prominent way

Dammit we're never getting The Chicagoist back are we

chicago

not their fault, but when you tell most young people “you can’t judge me”, they have the capacity to snarl a “fuck you!” or “fascist!” tell that to a progressive clergy member and you get “welcome to the oubliette, I’ve been waiting decades for this, since grad school, you cannot escape God.”

in re: the first point, it is one thing to say “don’t talk about my moral judgment to a group of protesting students or youth” in the public arena, it’s a different animal to say it to a room of religious clergy. Doesn’t ring the same way!

• I do not think most elected Democratic offices are ready for what a more rampant progressive religious organizing effort will look like. • i’m glad others are seeing the particular rhetorical and political effect that progressive religious organizing can bring to electeds! Priests and rabbis rock

People realllly do not know what to do with liberal to progressive Christians. Like, I've been a regular church-goer my entire life. It has literally never been a conflict in my faith to believe in climate change, abortion access, LGBTQ equality, etc. I've known PASTORS who don't believe in hell.

maybe the defining thing of fundamentalism (inclusive of fundamentalist atheists) is treating religions and creeds and faiths as set-in-stone things that you can depart from, or fall away from. A refusal to contemplate a faith community as living and adapting to the questions of its age.

the fundamentalist-v-liberal battle in came down (comes down?) to liberals saying “we can accept literalists and conservatives in the church, along with many others” and the fundamentalists saying “everyone who isn’t one of us* is Not Christian” *inclusive of Catholics, liberals, etc

As always, if your position is that “only the literalists and reactionaries are the true form of a faith or religion” you ARE espousing fundamentalism

This is really an instance of a very longstanding trend where secular pundits end up unwittingly aligned with fundamentalists in treating the crudest and most extreme version of any faith as the genuine article and everything else as somehow inauthentic.

Cooking and the sharing of food is the universal human constant. Every culture has some kind of hospitality ritual that involves cooking and sharing food. It is so deeply embedded in our psyche that we instinctively do this with animals.

My most crank take is that if you're dismissive about food/cooking and treat it exclusively as a survival skill, you are failing to engage with one of the most fundamentally human behaviors that has shaped humanity as a whole and you are ignoring a pillar of the human experience

We've been doing heterotrophy for about 4 billion years, food is quite possibly the single most meaningful thing that a culture - a species - engages with

as someone who does a lot of home cooking, imma say 1: home cooking is a real skill. you're not born with it. you learn it and practice it and it is not easy. 2: people are, irrevocably, by our nature, SO FUCKING WEIRD ABOUT FOOD. food is not just calories. food is MEANING

High Fluidity

You know enough.

One of my favorite things in history is when you find a person who was clearly just on the spectrum, like buddy, nobody's that into major infrastructure projects and Etruscan literature without a hyperfixation

"Elementary, my dear Dachshund."

The pivot to video is a tax on women's time and dignity, I will die on this hill.

"what do you mean, there's places and communities where people are more pro-social and inclusive than where I come from?? I've spent decades betting on "everywhere has problems" and I'm unable to imagine that both things can be true!!" - Many Regular Internet Users

Not telling the public that Trump was deposed on January 6th was a generational mistake

Finally blocked out the time to watch this whole thing & you should too. It's long. Go make some popcorn. Try not to throw it when you get excited (because hell yeah). Overwrites some outdated info that made me less optimistic than I should be about our future (& righteous ire re: what's in the way)

Man people talk a lot about how much different/better movies in the 90s looked and this is a great example of a great-looking aesthetic you just never see in any digital color grade:

35 years later & the BACKDRAFT trailer still makes me want to run through a wall. Pure cinema

If you’re not, at most, one degree of separation away from a pro wrestling fan, you’re not aware of Real American Culture

I don’t particularly like living in the “leadup to” paragraph

The free-roaming turkeys of Saint Paul, Minnesota: - are enormous - don’t know where they’re going - have no plans or motivations - don’t understand roads - or anything at all, really

midcentury industry had some truly unparalleled company names. of course the self-consciously futuristic ones like "Tektronix" "Rocketdyne" "Teledyne" but also the nondescript but pleasingly evocative ones: "Fairchild Semiconductor" "Martin Marietta" "AT&T Long Lines" "North American Rockwell"

Their collective misunderstanding of the sources of American power - and how their largesse is all downstream from it - is authentically stunning. They believe they did it on their own, that their fortune isn’t a freak effect of the tax code, the courts, the Navy, rivers, & land grant universities.

Sacking The Washington Post probably has Bezos high-fiving his yachted authoritarian friends, all thinking they’re noble Centurions putting a knife into some loudmouth Senator under cover of darkness and saving Rome in the process. They fail to appreciate that they actually wrecked an aqueduct.

America was an unprecedented global hegemon because it used to be good at the boring shit needed to stay powerful.

One of the most annoying aspects of much geopolitical debate is how far it obsesses over supposedly superninja style US special forces or hyperflashy precision weaponry rather than the real foundations of American power that were once in logistics, naval strength, maintenance and mass production

Great thread on a misreading of the foundations of US power that you can find as much among more "edgy" European as American elites

4. As the Walton family — which owns 50% of Walmart stock — cheers its obscene wealth of over $500 billion, remember that all that loot was stolen from small businesses, workers, and you. You are paying for this monopoly in inflated grocery prices, lower wages, food deserts, and dead main streets.

3. Walmart also exploits the lack of Robinson-Patman enforcement to compel suppliers to raise prices to Walmart's competitors. Newly released FTC docs , for example, show that It conspired with Pepsi to force other grocers to raise their prices above Walmart's, thus preserving Walmart's dominance.

2. .Walmart exploited the shift in antitrust policy in multiple ways. One of the most devastating in small towns was that it sold entire categories of goods at a loss — and then raised prices once local retailers closed. Predatory pricing had been illegal, but a 1993 SCOTUS ruling said it was fine.

1. A reminder: Walmart's $1 trillion valuation is the product of decades of unchecked anticompetitive behavior. It's no coincidence that Walmart began its insane growth spurt after the 1980s decision to stop enforcing key antitrust laws. More than others, Walmart recognized what this meant.

#recipe link here: www.alewyfe.com/canning-bolo... #foodsky

Struggling with productivity (bc of the horrors) but that Bolognese sauce canning recipe is up! It's a tested Ball canning recipe (with some safe seasoning mods and scaling up) but you can simmer it longer and then freeze it if you don't have a pressure canner, or make freezer lasagna, ziti, etc. 🍽️🍜

can’t not hear and see:

Too many people on Bluesky think that relentless expressions of despair are a sign of intellectual sophistication.

No matter the breed, every dog has one of three default dispositions: 1. Dipshit 2. Has a Job 3. Trying to Pick a Fight with God

i know that this is an unpopular take, but everyone starting their own newsletter as a revenue stream is not a sustainable model for writing and reporting or for people who love and want to pay for media.

Greater love hath no one than this, that one lays down their life for a friend

We gotta come up with a better system than “everything rests on whether these twelve billionnaires are nice”

We can do this the easy way or the hard way, or the poached way or the scrambled way, or we can make this an omelette

I think it is Schleirmacher who has an eschatology that involves Christ choosing to stand in front of and be crushed by the wheel of history and that our call is to be like Christ. I think about that vision of what it means to be holy a lot these days.

Still enjoy this one