300 by Zack Snyder is unironically the biggest and most impactful piece of reactionary art.

The funny thing is, the Empire is scarier when Vader is just an attack dog. Like, they just have a fallen samurai mystic on their payroll as a mid-level lackey. The last dying echoes of magic and wonder in the universe from the old age is an errand boy.

And they kept their jobs despite that. Their disloyalty to the party isn't seen as disqualifying for leadership *by the party in Congress.* That's the problem.

One thing that's totally true in both situations is that a very small number of bad actors totally poisoned the discourse. A difference is that Schumer was one of those bad actors

The lack of turnover in the Trump admin in even these highly messy visible mouthpiece roles really implies to me that the people in the admin don't actually think they have a place to land after the admin.

jesse jackson was constantly played as a punchline on 90s late-night TV to the point that i didn't understand his history of activism and serious left-leaning political platform until i was much older. i have to think, to some degree, that was on purpose.

Happy year of the fire horse [Mark Rothko, Red on Red, 1969]

Every Obama admin aspirational policy memo is titled something like "Seek Ye First" or "Undo the Least of These" and every Trump admin aspirational policy memo is "Youth, Youth, Springtime of Beauty" or "My Honor is Loyalty".

In 1984 Jesse Jackson was running for President and wanted to come to Portsmouth to do a parade and his campaign kept running into roadblocks. He got involved personally and asked to be sent to “the person who could get things done”. And that’s how we met and became friends.

Doing a late-season BSG plotline over his girlfriend's blankie is A Choice.

i think jesse jackson was one of the most important american political figures of the post-war era and i think that his 1984 and 1988 campaigns for the democratic nomination still have a great deal to teach about forging a path to a more egalitarian world. RIP.

if your only interaction with scrolling algorithmic video is watching 6 minutes of Reels on the toilet first thing in the morning you can derive signs & portents about pop culture without being directly exposed to its madness like ancient priests watching the reflection of the sunrise through gauze

Rev. Jesse Jackson's "I *am* somebody..." remains one of the all-time great pieces of 20th century rhetoric / agitprop And he could deliver it at a Black separatist meeting, the Democratic National Convention, or on god-blessed Sesame Street (see below 🥹) RIP to the Voice of the Voiceless

I've been harping on it, these people have no idea how to actually do corruption. They keep making the small things so obvious that every normal person has to wonder what huge things they're doing as well that they're actually trying to hide

The house we bought a couple of years ago has one of those kitchen cabinets where you pull it out and it’s the trash can. Supposed to hide the trash away all demure & shit, except the inside of that cabinet gets fouler than any regular in-the-open trash can I’ve ever had.

i mean, i know that none of them have any shame, but apparently they are all even missing basic survival instincts, because congressional republicans will turn *hard* on this when they're in minority

People who've never read the Silmarillion never get to read the grim darkness of eternal war against the Ruinous Power of the North in the hands of an actually talented writer, not a latter-day pulp fiction writer. That's a shame.

If you see this, quote-post Star Trek 🖖

who up Starring they Crystal?

The drunk uncle theory. You don’t argue with the casually homophobic uncle at Thanksgiving dinner to change his mind; you argue so that the closeted cousin at the kids table knows there’s safe people and better possibilities out there

There’s going to be Covid style shortages of cars, TVs and even washing machines and fridges, then job losses because assembly lines can’t source solid state memory, just so the stupidest person you know can state with 100% confidence a chatbot confirmed dinosaurs coexisted with humans.

The notion underpinning it is "the universal is evil, the particular is saintly" which, believe it or not, is in itself an ethnic nationalist logic.

i don't like "steelmanning" but i do want to say that the discussion around "we have to vote all the time to keep out fascism" has never really addressed the core of the issue, which is that it gets tiring for every election to be "the most important election of our lifetimes."

It's not that people don't want to care. It's that they want to be able to trust the people that *do* enough to not have to devote a massive amount of time and resources into understanding things.

The greatest political talent of her generation is going to have to beat the Republican nominee and the New York Times editorial board. AOC alone can do that.

A favorite pastime of misogynists is blandly ignoring a 60 year old man stammering his way through an interview, but then perking up the second a millennial woman says "so, um, like--"

You know what's worse than letting your baby cry themselves to sleep? Accidentally dropping your baby on the floor because you fell asleep yourself while trying to get them to sleep on you.

AOC’s biggest problem if she runs for president is that the white men who control our media ecosystem will not so much put a finger on the scale to stop her as an entire hand it can be done (see: Zohran) but it’s going to be blatant and it’s going to be infuriating

I really do think this is very instructive of the ratfuckery that any Dem (not just AOC if she does run) is going to face unfortunately and I’m not really sure how you deal with it

Springfield's Haitian community is the lowest of the possible lows in JD's ethnic hierarchy proving themselves to be superior traditional Americans than JD's relatives.

At some point you have to stop fighting the wind and lean with it. Democrats are the party of Women and Queer folks. We may as well be honest about it.

I found the old 35mm slide for the cover for Neuromancer and had it scanned in for your pleasure. Enjoy!

Reading the Atlantic Rod Dreher profile and apparently all the man does is go to cafes and read and write all day, and he calls people like *me* decadent?

Devi and Vance are part of the same political project, Farage is not but is allied with that project.

I dunno, voters are fucking aliens. They gave George W. Bush a second term because he let 9/11 happen and John Kerry got a Purple Heart and this made them trust Dubya more on national security. Maybe they will decide communism is good one day. But if they do, it’ll be because the frumple was blorpf.

The Santa Claus of the North Pole is different from St. Nicholas, Bishop. North Pole Santa is actually Aulë, the Vala most concerned with craft and metals, hence the workshop. The "elves" are actually the dwarves he created, which men conflated with elves after the latter physically diminished.

Elimination of emissions standards was one of the pretty clear policy stakes of the 2024 election and it received about 1% as much coverage as whether Tim Walz retiring from the national guard after 21 years was cowardly.

peter, james, john, and the rest of the fellas

i think "cultural appropriation" as a concept succeeded in making actual cultural appropriation be seen as exploitative and weird for a lot of people. its just that complex ideas tend to degenerate into vulgar ones, especially (but not only) on the internet

is this about my shrek

I think Dave Hurwitz spoke well when he said "patriotism" is love of one's country, "nationalism" is hatred of everyone else's.

in an episode of stores dbj talks about the Quantum Leap where Dr. Sam Beckett jumps into a chimpanzee who they're doing crash test helmet tests on in the 1960s it looks like a fever dream

My English-Scots-Irish ancestors didn't die for multiculturalism; they killed for it. Killed Confederates who said shit exactly like this.

Closed borders are illiberal, the state enforcing with violence a hierarchy of humanity based on the arbitrariness of which side of an imaginary line in the dirt you happened to be born on. Free migration of free people is the only liberal position.

The really silly TOS and TNG episodes? The characters *realized* they were in dumb episodes and acknowledged the stupidity before solving it. "I am Apollo!" "...And I'm the Tsar of all the Russias"

Propaganda during WWI and WWII in fact

It's like Harvey Milk said: "All men are created equal and they are endowed with certain inalienable rights... that's what America is. No matter how hard you try, you cannot erase those words from the Declaration of Independence."

Most optimistic I feel about anything is when I recall that it was way harder to get to where US is now from where it started than it will be to get to where we need to go from where we currently are. It’s largely a matter of decolonizing our minds now. That’s why they wanna control what we see.

Reading American history will break your heart a thousand times but it will also fill you with such admiration and awe for all the people who were excluded from the protection of America’s founding principles and fought to promote, protect and expand them anyways

The myth of America as a white nation is a tawdry fiction, and an obscenity, and while those who promote that myth will never be sneered at as “activists”, there is no shame in being an activist for the messy, shameful, painful but honest version of our history.