I’d missed part 6, and I went and read it, and it’s too boring to merit comment. I looked at part 7 and it is too long to bother to read at all. And part 8 is this shit. Just who could possibly care?

We have to make sure that in the United States of America you very much do have to apologize for saying shit like this.

Frankly kind of fucked up that polo, water polo, and Marco Polo are three completely different games.

My 9YO had friends over to watch A Minecraft Movie last night, and my 12YO has friends over to watch The Hunger Games today, and the difference in rambunctiousness between 3rd and 6th graders is difficult to comprehend.

God this is absolutely gutting.

“My Country ‘Tis of Thee” is a parody of “God Save the King”.

See the thing about this site is that “migrant” and “homeless” are both shibboleths of the right, especially when paired, and seeing them together short circuits a lot of brains into believing people said a thing they literally did not say.

What this really is, is “I came to this angry because of the Big Account that wanted me to be angry about it, and then I looked at it and the reason I was angry was wrong, but I’m still angry so there has to be some way to justify it.” Very common on here.

Bunch of people on this fucking website are slamming Matt because they’re too dense to read the last 11 words of a 17 word post.

When Charlie Hicks, 78, a regular at the Shrimp Basket, stopped showing up, the chef went looking for him. He ended up saving his life. https://wapo.st/4qbkSUp

The thing about the first point here, under appreciating how many Trump voters didn’t believe he’d do what he said, is that it isn’t Pollyanna stuff. It’s a realization that people can be convinced, by us, if we have the will and determination to do it.

“Uncharacteristic” is such an enormously revealing word about the Times here. It reveals what they believe to be the Republicans’ fundamental nature (strength, agreement, resolve) from which they can only temporarily deviate.

My 14-yo-son has recreated the climax of Back to the Future in gingerbread and I thought you should know.

US seized another tanker carrying Venezuelan oil, this one not already on the sanctions list for Russian oligarchs and Iran. Panamanian flagged and belongs to a legal, China-based oil trader. Unclear what US will do with the cargo, but this looks like at least a partial blockade, an act of war.

I don’t have any free articles so I only got as far as this 22 year old selling donuts to his classmates at a markup in middle school and doing consulting for sneaker resellers in high school, and like Jesus Christ we do not have to validate their bullshit self-mythologizing. They are just predators

If I read this post out of context and was given ten chances to guess who it was meant to be about, I would not get it correct.

I don’t mean to call out this poster specifically, I just really don’t think this is quite how this works. AOC won by 38. Tlaib by 44. Omar by 49. Crockett by 69. Are we meant to believe that they are leaving value on the table by winning so lopsidedly?

Several of these third grade kids who came over were like “hey your house is kind of messy” and I’m like “yeah we can’t afford a housekeeper like you guys and 5/7 of the people in our house are net exporters of mess, gimme a break.”

Swing voters famously base their votes on sober consideration of the issues.

My son had some third grade friends over to watch A Minecraft Movie for a low key birthday party, and basically they all just wanted to play on our trampoline in the dark and this one kid just keeps swearing (ow you hit me in the fuckin balls!) and it’s the closest I’ve felt to an old man in a while

Winning a district is winning a district no matter how much you win it by.

“It’s like god gave you something, man, all those stories you can write. And he said ‘this is what we got for you, kid, try not to lose it.’ But kids lose everything unless there’s someone there to look out for them. And if your parents are too fucked yo to do it, then maybe I should.”

I think blocking and protecting your account is an unsolvable problem on social media. It’s trivially easy even to get past Bluesky’s nuclear block if you want, even though there’s a few more steps.

One thing that’s absolutely bonkers to me and makes me despair for media literacy is, with Avatar: Fire and Ash coming out, seeing people confidently assert that Avatar: The Way of Water was just a rehash of the original Avatar. Even if you don’t like them, this is transparently untrue!

This Yglesias piece in the NYT is horrifically bad. Almost every "fact" it cites is provably false. At best it is cocktail party banter from a pundit who knows nothing of energy. At worst, it was cut/paste from oil industry talking points. So, a rebuttal: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/o...

This is the area where I think the great man theory finds its best manifestation: not that individuals shape the course of history over broad social trends, but that they shape how those trends manifest at the edges.

I see people looking at this and saying it’s because Denmark’s health care system is better than the US’s and so we need vaccination more than they do, except fuck that entirely. That itself is an antivax view. This article makes clear that Denmark is a weird antivax outlier even in Europe.

Jesus fucking Christ.

If the president is a probable child rapist he should maybe be impeached, I don’t know.

lol I genuinely thought this was concept art for 2001: A Space Odyssey or something.

I would have called the combined entity “Communist Party of Nepal (Nepal)”.

I think there’s also possibility of financial crimes, but barring the search function being busted because they’re incompetent, if these files show nothing on Trump, it’s simply not credible.

Is Trump fixing to be so cooked that people who have lashed themselves hard to him are realizing they are cooked by proximity? A man can hope.

How many other things do we figure Trump is gonna affix his stupid name to before he’s not exercising the powers of the presidency anymore? Like the lib memes from 2016 about him plastering his name on the White House and painting it gold might come true.

These limp fucks couldn’t even match the letters.

Also by learning a little bit of the local language you can converse with other non local people visiting from non anglophone places! I had a lovely rudimentary conversation in Spanish with a Japanese couple at Machu Picchu.

Trump has helped loose this kind of thing and it is on us to make people once more ashamed to say shit like this by delivering ruthless social consequences to everybody who does so.

Not to needlessly drag out a discourse but this post also describes that Kate Wagner piece yesterday. The people she hates are *also* liberals, and the piece is about retrofitting an intellectual justification about that hate being correct.

This is a really good point. The slow corruption of media standards so that they’re not allowed to say anything is illegal until the Supreme Court weighs in, and then once they have, they’re only allowed to say what the Supreme Court said, is a good example of this.

I’m once again given to ask what would be the avenues of legal challenge if he directed contractors to demolish the Washington monument or the Lincoln memorial or the US capitol.

I hear this all the time, and like, I *get* it, but also I have a hard time believing it in the age of hyperpolarization we live in. Who would have thought Biden’s agenda was good except Biden didn’t say it right? Who would have thought Trump was bad except Biden didn’t say it right?

Next: Every Dog Has His Day by Bryan Smith. This one feels very like the opening bits of The Stand with Frannie and Harold. It’s all about the loss of any purpose, finding yourself suddenly in an alien world, and trying to find one anyway. I dug it.

It’s interesting because the administration’s inability to hold back its own frothing at the mouth ideologues is what’s harming it in Congress. And like I’d said before, this is the kind of shit that gets Dems behind renewing their no-RIF call and strengthening it to prevent stuff like this too.

I listened to the Pop Culture Happy Hour episode on Avatar: Fire and Ash this morning, and it highlighted what I see as the big problem of film criticism in the age of social media: the omnipresence and continual awareness of the predominant opinions of the film criticism community.

So uh, gotta wonder about the judge that was comfortable presiding over this case.

He’s gonna be running as the incumbent at that point so I guess it makes sense.

“The way people are being vile and rude to me is actually unacceptable and is disproportionate to what is in reality a very mild critique” is actually a fucking killer sarcastic copypasta.

We are not a point on a bad-good continuum with thresholds that mark us as one thing or another.

When Bush wanted to privatize social security, to offer a cheap simulacrum of the thing, a faux program that was more properly an anti-program, our answer was that we wanted the program we already had. We don’t need to be purely reactionary and act like their wanting to destroy means we do too.