You have to look past the fact that this is an attempt to project confidence and power and see it for what it is: an open admission of weakness and desperation. Strong people don’t act like this. Weaklings who wish they were strong do.

Like those before it, that insane, vile DHS statement about the Minneapolis shooting isn't about covering anything up. It's performative lying. They aren't trying to persuade anyone that their agents did nothing wrong. They're trying to project that their agents can get away with anything.

My tinfoil hat belief is that what happened to Maduro was a dry run for a snatch-and-grab kidnap/arrest of a governor and who knows maybe I was wrong and it'll be Frey instead.

Tapping my "They are generating fake videos with AI and telling him they're real" sign.

It takes an enormous amount of courage to stand there, keep filming, and scream "What the fuck, you asshole" at someone wearing a badge who just shot and killed one of your neighbors in cold blood.

Read the whole thing. It's good, I promise.

If CSAM is OK, then anything is OK. Literally anything. And that is the point. That is the goal: a world in which nothing at all is illegal, taboo, forbidden, or beyond the pale. It's the world they dream of living in and we are very nearly there.

Perfect, no notes.

Bloomberg's X account has more than 800k followers. Their most recent post was shared five times It would basically come at close to zero cost for outlets like Bloomberg to delete their X accounts, and "We don't want to use a non-consensual deepfake abuse app as a comms platform" is a fine excuse

Amazing to live in a country where every day you can watch Republicans gin up issue salience out of nothing but attitude and 4chan posts and a sizeable chunk of people think Democrats' only power is to vote yes or no on bills placed in front of them

Cheers. The only show with a good finale, ever, was Cheers.

I get that nothing will come of this but if you want people to think a thing is bad you have to do things like this over and over, no matter how futile it feels or is. There's a reason the GOP voted at least 60 times on pointless attempts to repeal the ACA between 2010 and 2016.

Ages ago i wrote a thing about how the antisemitic, anti-American statements that immediately and unequivocally ended Charles Lindbergh as a public figure seem quaint compared to what we see public figures say out loud with their whole chests every day now. Thinking about that today.

There should be a separate line at every fast food establishment, grocery store, etc for people who don't know what they're doing and need the basic options and procedures explained to them.

one thing I keep coming back to as a potential deterrent to Trump's lust for Greenland (however amusing it may sound) would be a credible, coordinated threat to boycott the 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Olympics; Trump loves to be at the center of shit like that and it would hit him hard

With our national commitment to never remembering or learning anything, I’m not surprised that everyone has already already forgotten those Iraqi defectors in 2002 who went on TV every day promising how much the people of Iraq would love it if daddy America invaded.

Trump is a morality test and integrity test and courage test and it's stunning how many people fail all three so miserably.

It's incredible to watch people continue to do the "Wow, I guess you don't understand how the system works!" routine when every single day we are shown incontrovertible evidence that the way the system works is apparently that the president gets to do literally whatever he wants.

This is objectively untrue. Shutdown starts Jan 30. That doesn't change w/o Dem votes. Nor any non-reconciliation legislation. Also other kinds of obstruction and forcing votes. The minority party is not completely powerless, esp. in the Senate. If they pretend to be, that is a choice, not reality.

Waiting for every elected official who backed a thinly-veiled anti-trans bill called the "Kids Online Safety Act" to say anything about the fact that formerly-twitter is now offering its users a literal child p**n generator. I mean you are all deeply worried about the safety of kids, right?

One of my least favorite genres of post is “aha, look, the stock prices of oil companies/defense contractors/whatever have all gone up“ and they’ve gone up like 2%.

Excuse me whilst I kiss* the sky** *watch ** the criterion 4K of Barry Lyndon with the uncompressed mono soundtrack on an OLED

Whenever I see someone getting out over their skis on a foreign policy take I remember Caitlin Flanagan confusing Ayatollah Khamenei with Ayatollah Khomeini and then claiming she was actually expressing a profound truth.

The facial tic I’m developing from seeing people post that graphic showing Venezuela having the world’s largest oil reserves…

Yeah I’m one of those political scientists and I published one of those (many) papers. Term limits are just bad. It’s all bad. There’s nothing good about them. They don’t do anything their proponents say they do & have many malign side effects.

Wonder why journalists, like elected officials and their hangers-on, don’t want to see predictions markets regulated. Insider “trading” must be pretty sweet on the side!

The reason you feel so overwhelmed and hopeless is exactly this; part of you realizes that absolutely everything needs to be torn down to the studs and rebuilt from scratch. Which is, you know, daunting. But here we are.

By Wednesday Trump is going to be visibly irritated if reporters are still asking him questions about Venezuela.

Mark Kelly puts out a statement saying "The President of the United States just overthrew a foreign ruler and explained to the American people that this is about taking control of the oil reserves of a foreign nation." This is probably the strongest statement alongside Gallego's I've read.

“The problem here is that he didn’t follow the rules” is the only argument you can really make when almost no one in your coalition is anti-war in any meaningful sense.

The thing about following this stuff in real time is that nothing Trump or anyone around him says means anything. They’re just vomiting words and they forget everything they say 3 seconds after they say it, with zero follow through. In a week the story will be different or they’ll be bored with it.

A lot of people forget how in 2004 the Bush regime kidnapped the democratically elected President of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and dumped him in Africa.

To get the support to last more than one brief news cycle you need to feed people the lines, like they did in 2002-03. “WMD! Hans Blix! The UN inspectors! Atta in Prague!” If you skip this part, people won’t have the thought-terminating cliches they need to easily, lazily justify their support.

Entering our Too Lazy to Manufacture Consent era

Why is that Aussie-themed male strip revue called Thunder Down Under when Penile Colony was right there.

Pouring one out for the Bulgarian Lev (1880 - yesterday)

And thus began our decade of white men openly, brazenly and vigorously doing crimes and getting away with it. “The refuge occupation was a rash before a fever, a symptom of our approaching political chaos.” H/T @leahsottile.bsky.social

There have been no good reasons for staying on Twitter for years now, but at this point you will have to follow up any of your remaining excuses with “…and I don’t care about the child pornography.”

Cover reveal. It's about how & why colonies/states controlled international & domestic migration until 1888, why in the late 19th c the feds took over, & what it was like for politically disfavored groups to live under that arrangement of power. You can't understand voluntary migration history 1/

Hey I don't think you should use a website that generates CSAM on demand

It’s ok Alabama, at least you have….lol I’m kidding you don’t have shit else.

My love, you needn’t describe it. It’s right here.

Take a big sip of hot coffee and click through to learn how he was “involved”!

The TTU defense might be the best in the country but good lord is their offense a marzipan dildo

They do not want to do they job they have so they are all desperately trying to keep doing the job they imagined they would have. Some of them are *so* self-centered they forget they aren't supposed to admit this!

If you or someone you love has lost custody of your couch to a dog weighing less than 20 pounds, you may be entitled to compensation. It’s YOUR couch; get it NOW.

NYE as a rideshare driver was interesting because the demand graphed so predictably: huge from 9 to 11, 100% dead from about 11:15 to midnight, and the biggest surge/bonus you’ve ever seen at 12:02 AM as everyone simultaneously decides “OK we made it, let’s get the fuck out of here.”