getting gamers to understand the basics of elo and elo variant matchmaking ranking systems: challenge level, impossible

somehow it doesn't seem to be working out for interests of Men (TM) to have the dumbest, most insecure-about-their-masculinity fuckers be in charge of defining and defending what it is to be a Man (TM). an actual "real man" is mostly made of shrugs and remembering to stop at the pet store.

It's also hard to express, on a really selfish personal level, how awful it is to see my twinned loves of Reconstruction constitutionalism and the New Deal-Atlanticist administrative state get ripped apart

Whatever we do after all this, please let a vengeance tour remember the DOGE boys

The regulatory state is more important to the smooth operation of society to which we’ve become accustomed than anyone in this administration realizes, and in a lot of ways, we’ve already run off the cliff and are just starting to look down

As we learned during COVID, the only thing Americans truly get angry about is being personally inconvenienced. And they're about to be inconvenienced by the butt load.

It's funny learning that the reason there's going to be a crippling helium supply shortage even though the United States once had a huge strategic reserve of it is literally because Republicans did the "jeff thinks the beans have to take turns lmao" thing to it

It's becoming clear that global elites are in the midst of a moral panic. I don't know much about Polanski, but Mamdani's proposals (as well as the policies he's enacted as mayor) aren't particularly radical. Modestly raise taxes on the wealthy and improve public services. That's it!

Same in America as it is here: our wealthy ownership class has been winning and getting everything their way for decades, for so long that even the threat of any kind of reverse at all feels like intolerable oppression and the path to the Gulag, for them.

I am not saying there aren't reasons to worry about increasing pressure on the grid from tech; I'm not defending the conduct of bad actors like Musk; I'm definitely not defending AI generally. But the actual surge in opposition to data centers looks and sounds like viral NIMBYism, in large part.

i have a deep seated and irrational loathing of the god of war franchise. just admitting to that.

every "simple recipes for dipshits like you" website is some involved nonsense no i want the REAL simple ones. the bachelor meals. the girl dinners. the "i melted some cheese on a flatbread and sprayed it with sriracha" meal ideas saltine crackers in a can of soup. that's the level i'm at.

There are more actual Nazis out there than decent people think. And I get it. Their beliefs are ludicrous & irrational! You’d think something so kooky couldn’t possibly sway large numbers of people! But it does, & the decency in your heart is leading you to underestimate the threat.

every time i see a white guy in their fifties radicalized by the twitter algorithm into racism and extremism i think about how it's a total failure of the youtube algorithm to instead radicalize him into home brewing, elaborate A/V setups, or DIY solar

the major asymmetry in our politics is that the median conservative believes liberals are the spawn of satan and the median liberal doesn't. Carl Schmitt was not totally wrong. we should view Trumpism the way our abolitionist intellectual forefathers viewed slavery.

beginning to really think this is essentially a farcial version of the immense backlash to evolutionary science in 19th and 20th centuries

i had to read it so you have to too

It isn’t sexy, exactly. I mean for chrissakes it’s tax policy. But in a quieter and uglier way than the obvious stuff, these ideas are eroding the foundations of civil society.

I find this new bipartisan push to abolish taxes for [insert your favorite class of people] terrifying.

It’s truly astonishing to see how comprehensively the US government is tearing down every part of the system that has made it up until now a world-leading power in science, research, and technological development. The entire world will suffer from this wanton destruction.

In the 1950s, a blender cost between $30 and $40 ($375-$500 current value), depending on quality. Now, the average blender costs between $50 and $200. Blenders are both cheaper *and* better than they were then.

I’ve made this point before but across Trump’s two terms, he’s been responsible for exactly one affirmatively good policy choice: project warp speed. And of course he has since disowned that effort. Everything else has been strictly violence or punishment for the sake of it.

a nice thing about barely paying attention is i don't know who anyone is except the seven main people i hate a lot keeps it simple

the important thing to realize about republican primary voters is that they’re bad people

Trump being just unambiguously bad and worse than basically every conceivable alternative in basically every single way makes people get kind of bored and search for more novel takes. sometimes the truth isn't terribly interesting, sorry.

And of course "capitalism is too important to be left to the capitalists"!

(dog after eating a bee) I got that bee in me

Aww jeez, looking back on this in the morning, I gotta say: I'm sorry Sorry that I said your emotional support apocalypse wasn't coming (ohhhhhh gottem)

and 2.5 C is "world war ii every 50 years forever," not "everyone dies"

It’s good to make new friends, even if they are a little different from you

Yeah it's just a (nominally) secular eschatology. It's a belief system about the End Times, complete with a moralizing core premise ("we deserve this judgment").

Social media is bad! Hundreds of thousands of people will say things like "the earth is dying" and none of them will go to ClimateTracker and see that, actually, we got a real good shot at beating 2C

i will admit i really struggle to call “if you stop taking the medicine it stops effecting you” a problem. that seems like just about the ideal thing for a medicine to do

is this the year i watch every episode of the x-files

Sorry buddy, it is in fact true that feminism is the solution to what ails you. I can't fix that for you.

On one level, it’s true that wallowing in identity doesn’t win wars. But it’s also true that crafting an identity - who you are, what you care about, what you are willing to kill or die for - is absolutely essential to winning wars.

I really don’t consider the unspecified dissidence against GLP-1s to be much different than being anti-vax

You must break your mind of the notion that there is are vast differences between Italy, Greece, the Levant, and North Africa. Whatever differences exist there, they are those among brothers, while northern Europeans are mere cousins.

it's an absurdity of the modern era that most Americans consider an Italian to be from the same basic area as an Irishman but not a Libyan.

worth remembering once again that a number of Democrats and their pet pundits who feel very entitled to run this party going forward advocated leaving this innocentnman to rot in CECOT

What I hate most about the “Harris would’ve been the same” discourse is not that it’s plainly wrong. It’s how it neuters agency, as if there are no such things as outcomes, consequences, or history. It’s self-exculpatory and nihilistic. You cannot be blamed because nothing matters. Pathetic.

I think it was better when a man who was not genuinely insane had all the nukes, yes.

Really think we could stand to drop the utterly credulous headline style of "Billionaire says doorway to Narnia will be open by 2027"

Like, the whole thing about “objective biological sex” is something idiots think is an own bc they think “oh this is something I remember from elementary school that scientists, because they’re woke, are ignoring to not hurt feelings” and they think this makes them the real experts

I suspect that creationism is so salient because it suggests to conservative whites that they are related to black people. "You're telling me this ape is my cousin?" may not be, really, about primates

has any institution in your life, you, the american voter, delivered harder than the biomedical research complex? a fuckin respiratory virus shows up out of nowhere you get a vaccine ahead of schedule. meanwhile we're knocking out HIV and diabetes and goddamned pancreatic cancer on the side.

there are many reasons republicans love corruption. it mimics their retrieval and prey drive from nature. it provides exercise and mental stimulation. it helps sharpen their teeth and introduces flavors. their owners praise the behavior wait i might be thinking of dogs and fetching sticks

listen to Mr Medlock. what you do is tax the piss out of basically every transaction and make up for any unfairness with a super generous welfare state

The bridge between liberals and socialists lies in Machiavelli, and the political realist tradition more generally: a Republic cannot long endure a class of wealthy notables who undermine it at every single turn.

Raising taxes to pay for expanded and improved government services is literally the opposite of austerity politics. Anti-tax leftism has got to be strangled in the crib before it destroys what scant hope we have of ever implementing a social democratic system in America.