sadly real history has very few Norway-Brazil clashes but kids I'm here to tell you about a little game called Civ VI

There was a whole discourse the other day about whether or not it was good to cheer for the US team and whether Americans and foreigners could feel good about them winning

AI isn't 'inevitable'. Banning and resisting it isn't 'going against the tide'. We can reject this narrative and determine our own future. But it will be a fight, and it will take greater tech literacy. Which tools are bad and which are not? Who are the bad actors? Which politicians are fighting?

They willfully and even gleefully surrendered and are annoyed at the great many people who didn't.

It does make me fucking furious how many things that seem to be mainly used to enable child abuse are being accept in society because they’re owned by fascists

The main problem with The Star Spangled Banner is that it’s both a dirge and also very hard to sing. For however dull God Save The King is, it’s a very simple tune and hard to actually mess up. In contrast TSSB has mid-stanza octave shifts and even trained singers struggle with them.

compared to their love, your most cherished relationship is garbage. you think you know what love is? what you call love they recognize as profound loathing. in the shadow of their love you and your partner live in darkness and mutual enmity.

An understated part of the Imperial conversation is that in comparison to the Europeans, at least Britain 1) admits what the game is about 2) feels vaguely bad about it

Well, there goes my Saturday. youtu.be/rHtDYiltF6o?...

this person is mad obviously but I do think this is the entirely logical endpoint of the way a lot of people online use indigenous/colonising language as simple binaries and seem to want to go back to some imagined primal era of ethnically homogenous microstates

Yonge Street regularly has over 10x more pedestrians than cars, even in the rain. Yet cars get 2x more space. This video faces west at Yonge/Edward, and only captures the west sidewalk, and peds still out number cars. YongeTOmorrow with wider sidewalks & more dedicated pedestrian space is overdue.

i think celebrities exist to say bullshit like this. i dont want them to get married. i dont want them to do activism. i want them to say they think they are reincarnated aliens

Wondering if a bit like Boris and partygate, we are reaching the point of "None of this matters until suddenly all of it does".

i genuinely think thinking like a political scientist and/or sociologist helps avoid the temptation to read elections as part of a grand narrative drama and instead part of our social practices

Genuinely, i think probably the most important thing for international economics is broad cross party consensus that this stuff sucks

I wonder how much self-serious discourse we'll see about imperialism and feeling ashamed for rooting for said country during that game on here. Haha jk there wont be any bc this app is full of ppl who think that term only applies to the US.

touching to think that sometime about now, Taylor Swift will be biting Travis Kelce's head off and preparing to use his body as a vital source of nutrients.

The Taylor Swift wedding guest list be like.

Expectation: What if political parties organised their own social services and leisure activities again, like in the 1920s Reality: Instagram just showed me a post about the dedicated France Insoumise Minecraft server

This an official Vatican photograph of Leo at Lampedusa, Italy - one of the world’s heaviest migrant sites - where he went this morning to pray for migrants who died at sea. This is after turning down the offer to come to the United States.

This summer saw a barrage of articles in the mainstream press declaring Pride is no longer necessary because the gays have won everything and the trans people should all just disappear. Neither is true. It’s just their “tolerant” masks are slipping 😡

My favourite thing about (non-Buddhist/Jain etc) reincarnation is that without fail, everyone who believes in it always claims to have been a famous or interesting person rather than one of a billions of ancient Chinese peasants.

The pure essence of Starmtrooperism: completely uninterested in policy, Whitehall delivery, just “he must be good at being PM because he’s had an impressive career”. Almost every failed minister who gets kicked out in the first reshuffle had an impressive career.

The Vela Incident (1979, [colorized])

a theory of mine is that the internet and social media allowed for more 'effeiceint' political sorting around personality traits because online interaction is so frictionless and deracinated, so the other things that would have sorted people get scrambled

it was nice of them to celebrate cabo verde’s heroic performance

oh, no, okay, i can see the problem here: i don't think i'm kinder or nicer than the average x user, i think i'm *better* than they are. common mistake, happy to clear that up.

Had a friend describe Harry Kane as “handsome or incredibly weird-looking depending on the angle” and I had to explain to her that that’s just what most English men look like

This person does concede that there is a reasonably strong case to banning the show (especially, at a basic level, on the sanctions grounds!) but the conversation does reflect how the Ukraine war - despite being a reasonable consensus in the UK - has just collapsed in salience

i genuinely think this might be her waterloo

Bring It Back! "... #OpenStreetsTO gave us a beautiful, large-scale model: a few weekends each summer, major roads like Yonge & Bloor closed to cars and opened to families, cyclists, artists, & businesses. It was vibrant, inclusive, and joyful." h/t @spacing.bsky.social spacing.ca/toronto/2025...

I know I'm deep in this with the diss, but forcing alliance dilemmas on NATO members is the obvious Russian strategy and we should be doing everything we can to push back.

For all its many, many flaws, the one good thing about Corbynism was that it briefly punctured the horrific incestuous Westminster/media bubble

In addition, unless your business is “links” (which Bluesky is great for), Bluesky isn’t worth the candle, and the devolved moderation system just is never going to work for most people, sadly.

I think young people think Xers and Xennials had magical non-profit community centers on every corner with clowns and an arcade and movie theaters or something

We should all be concerned and angry about the police demands for more money on things that should just be part of their existing job. Negotiating the base police budget is tough because of the system, but we should really demand that it should cover all these items.

It’s popular to claim that “the capitalist west” just wants to economically exploit Ukraine but literally every eastern bloc country that aligned westward is now much richer & has much better human development outcomes than under communism

it’s worse than this! a ton of people on the other side of the political divide also lose their shit if you propose regulating their heroin suppliers. can you imagine how many leftist influencers would lose their livelihoods if meta was actually held accountable for what they posted?

My last hot take for today is that the decline in ‘third spaces’, drinking, & violent crime are all pretty tightly linked

so if we imagine this kind of socializing as a sign of health and then we think of phones and social media as a kind of drug then i think the conclusions point against “build more third spaces” and towards “regulate the drug/social media companies that have addicted society itself”

It's a bit distressing to realize that, despite being one of the most documented and studied periods in human history, the population who understands WWII as a thing that actually happened to real people is rapidly being dwarfed by the population that understands it as just another fandom.

Coming back to this, I think it's basically 70% right in that radical right beliefs + politics were always present in contemporary society, just had heavy norms against expression. Musk made it easier to weaken the norms, but 2016/Brexit shows the underlying belief was always there

Circles was great for "I want to say this to the 25 people who'll get it, not everyone who might happen to see it".

"if it’s profitable for a private company to borrow to build a new town then it must be profitable for the government to do so too, simply because the government can borrow more cheaply than the private sector."

Getting in some good old fashioned kid trouble is better than falling down an online right wing radicalization rabbit hole.

These people are coddled do-nothings clinging desperately to the legacy of their ancestors

Interesting to note when Steve Paikin drops his “I’m just a neutral passive observer of politics 🙂” routine and starts editorializing and endorsing candidates, who in this case happens to be the son of an old friend (the disgraced ex-Mayor John Tory) www.tvo.org/article/anal...

Tired: the Minions worked for Hitler Wired: the Minions worked for Papa Doc Hired: the Minions worked for Eamon de Valera

Hans Globke 🤝 the Minions Giving wholly unconvincing answers about what they did between 1933 and 1945

Every Trump voter gets betrayed by him soon or later, in a manner and time specific to who they are and what piece of their dignity they gave up to support him