Instead, he and/or his advisors decided to go the exasperated, "Fine, if it's SUCH a big deal I'll cover it up, SATISFIED NOW?" route, like a teenager who blows off putting dishes in the dishwasher & finally does so after being nagged while rolling their eyes & making a big show of doing so.

If he had STARTED his campaign playing the "I used to be a complete dick, then I changed, here's my journey from asshole to decent person" narrative, including "I even got a fucking Nazi tattoo because I was a naive moron in my youth" I'd be a LOT more sympathetic. But he didn't.

He repeatedly insists that he "never thought about it in anything other than a military context" which...I mean, ok, but you're saying that you didn't ONCE in 18 years ever think to look it up even out of idle curiosity, given that you're not only a soldier but also supposedly a military buff? 5/

Platner then again airily shrugs it off as being just "a skull & crossbones," chuckling slightly about it. He again reiterates that "skull & crossbones" logos have been "popular since the Romans" (not the greatest reference if you're trying to win over Jews, btw). 4/

--you refer to the tattoo as "resembling" an insignia which "some" SS Nazis used. It didn't just "resemble" the Totenkopf insignia, it WAS that SPECIFIC insignia, used by the SS Death's Head Units to administer the Nazi death camps. The fact that you can't even admit what it was is...troubling.

--You refer to his ugly/nasty Reddit comments as happening "years ago" which is technically true...the most recent shitpost was June 2021, which was indeed "years ago" but was also just 22 months before he appears to have registered his campaign domain name in April 2023. 2/

capping a week of stories about elite depravity with a story about a journalist who broke basically every possible ethical rule (and was rewarded for it) to elevate an unqualified wealthy failson who is trying to destroy american public health is, well, it's a lot, tbh

Right now, this website is stuck in a very shitty hard place between defending its values and avoiding being shut down by MAGA goons

In the specific case of the grotesque US government accounts on here, I do wish they’d ban them for threats, and also I kinda get why they’re not doing so against accounts run by the world’s biggest government that has been taken over by fascists who specifically hate Bluesky and its user base

imagining hypothetical Andor continuation show set between ANH and ESB where a holo-media influencer gets Director Partagaz's job

Describing a 72-hour ban that you caught and lied about as being "disappeared" when there are people being disappeared in actual fact every day is certainly a choice.

it’s fascinating to watch the coterie of straight white dudes who surrounded Obama and clearly consider themselves to have been running the show and responsible for Obama’s success due to THEIR brilliance in being willing to prop up a Black figurehead.

men

You know who’s pushing this idea? Power companies who partner with solar installers to get rooftop solar on residential (This is good)

Pffffffffff what the fuck are we even doing here

“Do you not know, my son, with how very little wisdom the world is governed?" — Axel Oxensternia, 1648

"Every world leader you imagine doing statecraft is actually just making decisions based on a whatsapp group full of scumbags responding to, 'wot r pplz vibes re: Putin?'"

I would take a piece on this - how the Epstein letters expose how shoddy and connection-based global governance actually is when you turn over the rock.

how could you ask America's finest minds to break off contact with a genius like this simply for abusing children?

Jesse Watters is straight up lying to his audience about the Epstein emails and hoping his viewers too dull and/or indoctrinated to notice

Anyway “be more like JCO” has been words to live by for me ever since “or is query naive?” lodged itself in my head permanently never to leave as citizens of the internet, baffling galaxy brain shitposts and heavily encoded enthymemes are our birthright

as someone who has caught a couple Bsky blocks for reasons I’m genuinely even unsure of but who definitely… I mean I leave a lot in drafts or the group chat. and like. man, the shit ppl do is fucked up and infuriating, yes, but this is correct:

I'm kind of baffled how the "moderates" have apparently all decided to turn against climate policy at once, just as China reaches green electrostate liftoff mode. I thought these people were all about National Greatness and making Hard Choices

well, that's (another) dealbreaker for Josh Shapiro in 2028 www.eenews.net/articles/rgg...

In 2010 the Arizona legislature tried to ban developments in lightbulb technology and in hindsight that had a lot of predictive and explanatory power

the astonishing thing about this wave of denialism is that we have more or less decidedly hit the point where clean energy is the *cheaper* option by some distance

see that’s poster’s bushido, the way of the hater, right there

It is a beautifully tortured deployment of English to write “This is a hoax! A hoax which… incriminates my enemies, but not me!”

I keep seeing versions of this and it's annoying. He chased a Black man with his gun long before the stroke. It was reported when it happened and it was a never-ending battle on Political Twitter during the primary. He is responsible for his actions, just as the left was for its support.

It's ONLY been 65 years since six year old Ruby Bridges walked through the halls of William Frantz Elementary as the first Black child to attend an all white school. Met with mobs and hate, her bravery and courage helped change the course of history for this nation. (1/3)

Warrior poet Joyce Carol Oates knows telling Elon "KYS" is less effective than reminding him of the misery of his existence.

for example: we just watched Joyce Carol Oates break Elon Musk’s psyche into 20,000 wriggling maggot-like pieces, and she said nothing anyone could ever construe as a bannable threat in the process

western water law really gets me. shit was hastily cobbled together 150 years ago and even at the time people could see it was setting up a long term disaster, and now it’s here, but we’re stuck with it sorry

The law is the law as enforced, there is not a body of “as written” law that has some theoretical precedence over the enforced law

But if it were enforced as written, the internet as we know it would not work, and people would be outraged if things everyone intuits as fair use were no longer possible. Wanting that to happen but only against LLMs seems both unlikely to work and potentially have bad consequences.

Have to disagree with you here, it is actually true that copyright law prohibits huge swaths of extremely common activity on the internet. People hand wave and stretch fair use far beyond its actual applicability, but really this all works b/c enforcing copyright law is just too hard and expensive.

i think it might be worth banning or heavily restricting LLMs, but doing so by asserting that the commons has always been completely closed and that it is absurd to assert otherwise is contrary both to what the law actually says and to good public policy

the idea of changing the law is so dead in america that the idea that something might be banned by statute rather than by arguing that it is already banned (in terms of water use, in terms of copyright) seems completely alien

Google has moved from moral cowardice (removing ICE tracking apps) to direct complicity in the violent, unconstitutional abuse of vulnerable people. As a civil liberties lawyer who worked at Google for ten years, this one hits me in the gut.

It really strikes me how interwoven his presentation of his faith is with his sensibility as a politician — I don’t know the last time I saw a Democrat opening any answer at any political event by quoting scripture — and he advocates a politics rooted in “love for our neighbors”

On why he chose running for US Senate instead of governor — “our government is broken” and “our relationships with each other feel broken” “My faith teaches me to love my neighbor as myself”

This is the first one I’ve seen Talarico in front of a crowd — he says St David’s is one of his favorite churches. The church hit capacity before it started, and to say people were excited to see him would be a massive understatement based on the noise in the room

*supervillain with a heart of gold voice* Well well well

Good statement from the US conference of Catholic Bishops

if we bring back the Newscaster Mid-Atlantic do you think that would unfuck our media environment? like a big collective magic trick. maybe that's what made it all work.

She’s certainly getting unusual amenities, but I have to say the choice to lead this piece with “unlimited toilet paper” is fuckin bizarre.

I don't think it gets mentioned enough that Bovino is a member of the civil service. He is not a political appointee. Yet he still engages in constant open partisanship while in uniform and with a DHS flag behind him.

Give a man a fish and someone with a thousand fishes is going to bitch about people getting free handouts. Teach a man to fish? Yeah, that person with a thousand fishes is going to bitch about that too.

"What if one of YOUR favorite politicians/celebrities/etc is on the list?" Did you all not notice how quickly we dropped Neil Gaiman when we found out about the things he did? Do you know how beloved that guy used to be and how loathed he is now? I think that right there should answer your question.