i know *why* they want to go after kelly, but intentional stupid is still stupid

I am more and more convinced that right-wingers are like this because they surround themselves with sociopaths to the point they don't know when they're broken inside because they're the same as the people they are regularly around. Traumatized people traumatizing their kids.

Thinking again about how the administration sees its self as content creators first as it becomes clearer that we don't have a plan in Venezuela

The end goal of Grok sexual harassment is to make women afraid to be visible. It’s a punishment for daring to exist in a way the perpetrators can’t control. There’s no one solution to this, because the problem isn’t just technological. It’s cultural. It’s misogyny. This is just one expression of it.

There’s a comically bad misreading of MacKinnon’s critique of consent in the New Yorker today, which seems to take it’s interpretation from the idea that MacKinnon and Dworkin claimed that consent was impossible under patriarchy—a lie perpetrated by Larry Flint.

Now that more and more women need men less for financial survival as in the past: "When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression" .

Studies show again and again women are happier single than in a bad relationship. Not so much for young men.

The serious answer to "why we shouldn't just take it," one that doesn't appeal to any international order or moral standard, is that robust alliances are a lot more valuable than whatever the US could take from allies by force. Or, as I put it last year: Allies Are Assets, You Idiots

Even worse, different members of the Trump administration have different things in mind. To the extent Rubio, Hegseth, and Trump have put any strategic thought into Venezuela, it's with different goals and different understandings of what matters in the situation. So the whole is even less coherent.

The tactical abilities of US special operations forces are impressive, but we already knew that and it's beside the point here. The most tactically brilliant military action means nothing, or can be actively detrimental, when undertaken on behalf of bad strategy. As is the case with US-Venezuela.

This is why Yarvin is frustrated.

I wonder how many NATO countries have consulted with a consortium of doctors and actuaries to generate an extremely sensitive projection to aid in their policy decisions.

The problem with people saying Trump would never actually try to take Greenland is many of those same people were once very confident he’d never actually run for president. I no longer have any confidence that we aren’t crashing headlong into maximum insanity.

Still disturbs me that the world's richest man has facilitated CSAM distribution crimes at scale and you'd never know it from most news sources, notably the New York Times. Going to guess now that he's finally saying they will address it, the Times will run a credulous story on that.

So Trump successfully bullied a good man and his family. Because winning over Harris Walz wasn’t enough. Trump wanted to destroy him. Walz is making the right decision for his family. But the success of Trump’s grotesque bullying campaign is yet another frightening step in our national descent.

If France sent in a team to kill his 20 bodyguards and whisk him to Paris to stand trial, I assume that'd be okay now?

Not from our government, so much.

Trump and Musk both testing how above the law they are, both pleased with the results thus far.

Trump can literally say any outrageous thing now and the result is a resigned shrug from most of the press.

death of a country by a thousand cuts

Yeah, it has long been the case that adult-oriented businesses have to be careful or risk the wrath of everyone from prosecutors to payment-processing companies, but "prominent social media company owned by world's richest person swiftly became world's largest CSAM producer" produces no reaction.

also, hammering the same message over and over is how you get it to sink in you knew it's been bad for a while? great! lots of people don't! "thing is bad" doesn't become popular consensus unless a lot of people who already know it's bad are willing to say so loudly and consistently

one of my favorite Rincewind subplots is that because he has survived so many completely absurd situations, people have a very hard time believing that he is exactly what he appears to be on the tin but he really, truly is

Discworld QOTD, from The Color of Magic "'We know all about you, Rincewind the magician. You are a man of great cunning and artifice. You laugh in the face of Death. Your affected air of craven cowardice does not fool me.' It fooled Rincewind."

LOL!!!

Trump isn't about that life. Mexico would whup Trump ass:

Minnesota has to come first - always. Today, I’m proud of the work we’ve done to make Minnesota the best place to live and raise kids. I’ve decided to step out of the race and let others worry about the election while I focus on the work.

CHina is now giving the US shit about Venezuela

this is so fuckin funny man. the most powerful person in the world made a sweeping declaration of american policy and it was almost immediately obvious that it was completely at odds with reality. why is everyone fixated on that www.nytimes.com/2026/01/04/u...

It's interesting seeing the people who say things like "that sounds great, sign me up" versus the people who say "uhhhh so like if Colorado is extremely dry and has no snowpack, what happens to the water?"

This story details that the teen they detained for six months was just about to graduate high school early at the age of 16. Definitely the kind of irredeemable criminal monster we don’t want in America.

my brother got me a fancy 4K steelbook set of the nolan batman movies so i’m rewatching BATMAN BEGINS for the 20th time and i still think this one is the best batman story of the bunch

the hypocrisy may be the point but also what a miserable way to exist, where you have to condition your entire worldview on whatever the marching orders are day to day and just fall in line I rather enjoy having consistent takes, actually, I think my brain would explode

There are a lot of people who have been proven fools with little understanding of the world over the last few years. Near the top of that list has to be John Mearsheimer, the international relations "expert" who has just called every single thing wrong.

1/Leaders are abducted/allies are threatened but pundits and governments are scratching their heads on what the US is doing. Danish PM on Greenland "It makes absolutely no sense". Why? Because actors using old IR models when we need a new lens. Enter neo-royalism. abcnews.go.com/Internationa...

December www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

Among the many reasons you don’t kidnap a foreign head of state at gunpoint even if you have the capability, is that it sparks consequences you can neither control nor anticipate.

Me and Scarface are pals now

that's how you get to stuff like 'this stubbornly argumentative Minnesota civil rights lawyer is a Nazi and must be driven from the internet'

that sometimes begins with a relatively mild complaint - 'so and so is annoying talking about X' and then builds from there as a kind of group catharsis, where it's not just the target's *actual behavior* that's obsessed over, but things that they've imagined the target is the kind of person to do

then you've got the stuff more characteristic of Will's weirdo stalkers, which I think of as the "Bad Art Friend" groupchat phenomenon. Remember that story? Remember how somebody whose offense was, at worst, being mildly insensitive and annoying became a villain in the groupchat?

the misunderstanding actually feeds the frenzy, the original poster has to be painted as inherently evil for attempting to defend himself. people don't want to admit their own misjudgment because going after a stranger over a wild misintepretation is shitty behavior, so instead they double down

I think there's two basic dynamics underpinning shitty mob behavior online, and the Sky Marchini/Will Stancil stuff is an unfortunate example of each. The first is a feeding frenzy - when a post is over-interpreted or just straightforwardly misinterpreted, and especially when it escapes context.

"trump wants greenland for the strategic location rare earth--" no he's just dumb

The United States has no checks and balances. The SCOTUS is corrupt, our congress is useless and Republicans are too cowardly to do their jobs. We have committed war crimes and violated international laws under the Trump administration. It’s pure insanity. We’re no longer a super power, we suck.

There are no excuses now for not knowing that X is a toxic cesspit. If you are still on X, these are your values.

he’s not going to stop until someone makes him stop bsky.app/profile/paul...

The Plot to Enslave America:

Kinda wild to me that Denmark hasn't tried to arrange this yet