“Who was president in 2020?” is the question of our time

This is some atrocious reporting. The law is not remotely ambiguous and is codified as a statute. The existence of a Treasury Department website providing historical context is of zero import.

This is such a flagrant violation of every principle of international law and sovereignty that it’s hard to actually believe even when we definitively know it is true (and even when it is consistent with all other behaviours).

Obviously, this is loser shit, but I think AI has really cemented itself as the visual language of fascism. It's anti-human, flattened, uninteresting, and cheap. It's like looking at a Potemkin Village and thinking that's the same as architecture.

Hey, look! This guy gets it.

Impossible to delink this from the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - the total militarization of law enforcement. Story opens with a Black Hawk helicopter deployed against Americans and only gets worse from there abc7chicago.com/post/ice-chi...

An icon - RIP

“ABC7 spoke to Pertissue Fisher, a woman who lives in the building. She said ICE agents took everyone in the building, including her, and asked questions later….’They was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other.’” It can’t happen here, you say. But it is happening.

An interesting bit of history in this thread.

Judge SLAMS the masking of federal agents in ruling finding Trump admin violated pro-Palestine protesters' rights: "To us, masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan." storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

The ruling itself is remarkable, but it closes with something I've never seen: a 12-page assessment of Trump himself as an ignorant bully, braggart and threat to free speech and the republic writ-large. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

This is correct. If you heard someone in an assisted-living facility rambling on this way, you'd be talking with the doctors about appropriate next levels of care. No kidding. And every officer in the room has to realize it.

The flew the entire military leadership in so they could see for themselves that the Secretary of Defense is a mouthbreathing dipshit and the Commander in Chief is a senile, weak old man who might keel over at any moment.

yeah, this is hegseth straightforwardly announcing that it is free play time for bigots in the ranks. and together with his comments on standards, he clearly wants to purge as many women, black and brown people as he can from the armed services. a white man's military.

would love to hear more congressional democrats say "should we win power next year we are going to treat every one of these as bribes and act accordingly" arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

This photo is amazing

What level of Online Boomer Brain Damage is posting an obvious AI slop video in which YOU YOURSELF APPEAR?

The default assumption should be that all of these mass shootings are being done by young, white men who have had their brains totally pickled by 4chan lolz accelerationist toxicity. The reactionary thirst of the culture-wars for partisan political points is exactly what's driving so much of this.

L, and might I add, MAO. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Mercifully, this Learned League season has finally concluded.

WANT.

Bearing your cross is a lot easier with wheels.

At the Nuremberg trials, Karl Dönitz was convicted of war crimes for the sinking of civilian vessels. This is not a complicated question, it's been illegal for centuries.

I beg of you, please, do not make me have to defend Bill Maher from government censorship

Make sure to wish a librarian a happy Gerald Ford Trapped in The Penn Library Elevator Day.

Police state thuggery

It’s deeply unfair to call today’s fascists “fascist” or “Nazis” just for doing bad things German Nazis did in the 1930s to advance their fascist project. And you better not say “fascism” or the fascists will come for you too!

The last political column I was allowed to write in the @washingtonpost.com was a criticism of Obama. His people took issue with my piece, but we were respectful. Now he is tweeting in support of me. This is how free political speech and respect for debate *actually works*. Or used to work.

Don’t you dare call us fascists, they say, as they force people off the airwaves for criticizing them while vowing to crush and criminalize their opposition.

I mean, the asshole who bankrupts casinos and rapes women and children and was on tabloids my entire childhood, the dumb fuck from tv with the “you’re fired” catchphrase, the guy parodied in a fucking Zemeckis movie, who was in “Ghosts Can’t Do It”, *that’s* the guy? That’s the American Hitler?

so many dead canaries and we just keep on mining

He killed again defector.com/how-do-you-s...

The trans partner of Tyler Robinson had no knowledge about it and was told to delete messages but didn't and instead turned them immediately over to the police and cooperated. Yet, the right is demonizing her and blame everything on trans people despite the trans person here doing the right thing.

my favorite robert redford story is that mike nichols considered him for dustin hoffman's part in THE GRADUATE. during their conversation nichols asked redford something like, "have you ever struck out with a girl?" and redford's response was basically, "i don't understand the question"

Last November I wrote that Republicans wanted to “socialize the means of cancellation” through the creation of a “Snitch State.” Feels relevant now. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

We're witnessing the most aggressive, fanatical crackdown on free speech in my lifetime. The speed and breadth of government censorship and private sector and nonprofit capitulation has been astonishing. As has the lack of urgency/silence from people who've long claimed to care about this stuff.

Even before the Post's firing of Karen Attiah, I wrote about the unbelievable irony of an unholy war to silence professors, schoolteachers, journalists and others who dare voice their opinions about the murder of Charlie Kirk, the supposed free-speech hero My column www.inquirer.com/opinion/comm...

korean reporting is nightmarish on the conditions Korean workers were contained in

There are very, VERY few people who are equipped to talk about this shooter correctly given the brainrot written on the shell casing. You have to understand so much of online culture to get it and also understand how that culture is both connected to and separate from real world ideological spaces

It really is a grim ritual that we have so many acts of violence that evolve into another grim ritual of everyone waiting to see what team the maniac played for, and half the time that has already been decided by the grim ritual of everyone speculating before anyone has any clue about it

This piece really captures the way-too-online-nihilistic-lolz-shooter dynamic that is has been menacing the world ever since the Christchurch shooting.

I guess this has probably already gone viral somewhere but I am simply dying at this picture of a bear that looks like it hired a photographer to do a glamour shoot

This bird with a gotdamn jheri curl been killing me since yesterday.

Yes. TAMU tape can be paired w countless memoirs of Red Guards calling out teachers for deviation from Great Leader Thought during Cultural Revolution catastrophe. "According to Our President, this is illegal." Cancellations at West Point (Tom Hanks!) and USAFA Cultural Revolution is the parallel

Important to remember that everyone involved in renaming the DoD to the Department of War is afraid to take the subway.

1/ I worked at DoD. I literally cannot imagine lawyers coming up with a legal basis for lethal strike of suspected Venezuelan drug boat. Hard to see how this would not be "murder" or war crime under international law that DoD considers applicable. Read expert analysis by @bcfinucane.bsky.social⤵️

Another step down the Duterte path...

Thanking the music gods for bestowing upon us new music from the Beth's, Spoon, and Superchunk within the past week.