People who criticise fantasy novels for merging medieval technology and aesthetics with modern moral norms are quite frankly missing the point which is that that is exactly what people like about it and that it is good

You guys realize the Jacquard machine is just a statistical trick, right? Power looms can't truly "weave"; they're just stealing patterns from real weavers and regurgitating them as hallucinogenic loom slop.

we should take in 500,000 refugees from around the world and instill in them a fighting spirit to defend the new home they have been welcomed to with everything they have. this is my doctrine

if i have to be nonchalant about the prospect of Russia levelling my home city to build an abstract 'progressivism', a thing they CONSTANTLY VOCALLY THREATEN TO DO, then I simply do not wish to collaborate with you on anything because you are literally a danger to my life.

What is this high school debate shit? Everyone wants peace! Adults just realize that any peace which lasts beyond a Russian re-arming / recruitment cycle has to be on terms that don't reward Russia's initial invasion with land and legitimacy, and which meaningfully deter future aggression.

The Argentinian claim to the Falklands is basically exactly the same stylistically as the Israeli claim to the Golan Heights: "lol i want it"

Once again tapping my "it really melts people's brains to consider that, despite generally being absolutely heinous, in the three major territorial disputes in the Americas that can be traced back to the British Empire, the UK is in fact on the morally right side" sign

no Argentinean has ever been born on the Falklands, no Argentinean has ever been raised there, the people of the land have no connections to them, they have literally no connection to the land other than an artificial nationalist mythology juked up by successive governments.

irredentist fantasies are bad, irredentist fantasies about territory you never controlled and have no actual connection to are worse, irredentist fantasies about territory you never controlled where the locals despise you that you lost a fascist-led war over are despicable.

me normally: yeah the UK needs to take a second look at their international history in 20th century politics, especially during the Suez Crisis me on the Falklands: RULE BRITANNIA

I have seen mutuals who flirt with a support of a possible American intervention in Venezuela. Let me remind you we are currently supporting Ukraine, a country that is being illegally invaded. The Maduro regime is an awful communist dictatorship. But it doesn't make illegal invasions ok.

No, you genuinely have no idea how wide this gulf is. Even with, say, Louis XIV's France. The resistance put up by local aristocratic parlements to Louis' decrees would have been unthinkable in Russia at nearly any time under the Tsars (brief, swiftly crushed exceptions aside).

again, the great paradox of all this is that ukraine is a country where the guilty get punished, being judged by two countries where the guilty do not

Olivia Nuzzi did more than violate journalistic ethics to help RFK Jr's campaign. She assisted an apostle of pestilence. In humanity's struggle against disease, fought since the beginning of history, she sided with the enemy. She betrayed the species. She betrayed us for her own gratification.

roko's basilisk is basically pentecostalism for guys who think grok passes the turing test

listen to me. listen to me right now. if you don't know what this tweet means, just close your device. don't look anything up. go for a walk. return in a week. if you don't listen to me, your life will be ruined and i can't be held accountable

On one side of my family we have zero knowledge of our lineage before my grandpa. There was just nobody left to ask. He wasn’t even sure if his last name was real or made up. And there’s a story like this in almost every Ukrainian household. Today is Holodomor Remembrance Day

If you're not willing to die for freedom you don't actually really want to be free.

in fact i'm not being funny when i say that the /only/ scenarios where the state of israel is likely to come to an end in some shape or form basically all go through the continued insanity of one benjamin netanyahu. in a sense, he is the world's most active anti-zionist

Looking the financial indices out of the UK and apologies if this has ever come up before, but have they considered reviving the economy by joining a large economic and political consortium of countries nearby, say in Europe?

It's great how every day of this war I have to explain to Americans that Eastern Europeans are not stupid and if they are asked to capitulate to Russia or die we will literally choose the rational option: death.

Oh no, please don't seize the assets of those European companies and individuals who stayed in Russia after 2014! Please, anything but that.

“Regardless of the aesthetics or ostensible goal of the self-organized countercultural community, there’s a decent chance that people want you to join it so they can fuck you, rob you or kill you with impunity” is a general maxim that has served me pretty well in life

People on the Left often complain about the BBC being too right wing, while people on the Right accuse it of left wing bias. Now, to me that says it must be fairly balanced. And YES - I have a show on BBC Sounds. But this isn't about me, and I genuinely think it would be a tragedy to lose the BBC.

My theory - 90s were so good in the west because russians were picking themselves up after fall of ussr and couldn't have intervened to make everything shitty to the scale they're doing it now I pray for a time when western libs finally understand that russia is not their friend and will never be

In light of today’s email dump, I will say I have at various times found my way into online discussion spaces containing a fair number of important and powerful men, and it is the greatest cure to imposter syndrome that humanity has yet devised

The people claiming a cabal of secret paedophiles runs the country, turned out to be a cabal of secret paedophiles running the country.

Irish antimilitarism is funny because the core premise is that Ireland‘s history of British exploitation is exactly why defense of Ireland‘s airspace and sea lanes should be mostly outsourced to the United Kingdom.

contemporary literary fiction: 33% "i am a grad student from oberlin and this is my situationship with a professor" 33% "i am a novelist getting a divorce from another novelist" 33% "i am a member of [insert marginalized group] and this is my trauma dump" 1% actually good stuff

it's not 'performative' if you're taking pictures of random fucking strangers reading. they're just reading! you're the creepy one!

Yes the high quality clothing preserved from historical eras is both beautiful and of tremendous quality, and inspires delight & awe from enthusiasts for its craft. That's because the ordinary stuff was used until it fell apart and was reused for towels and other incidental fabric!

We can and probably should articulate that while of course modern Russia and the Soviet Union were both imperialist polities whose end was objectively good, the latter was, at this point, less overtly evil, and all of its leaders bar Stalin would shudder at the sheer malice of Putin and his gang

I think a lot about American politics makes sense if you conceive of Trump 2.0 as basically a five hundred dollars a month subscription service to make the woke go away and Americans as forgetting to unsubscribe before the three day trial period is up.

Since it is apparently up to self-appointed, middle-aged white British men to decide who truly is or is not British, I’ve decided Matt Goodwin isn’t.

Scary stuff with this Russia backed proxy war in Venezuela. Maduro needs to respect America’s legitimate security concerns in their sphere of influence. Don’t they know the USA has nuclear weapons? Do they want WW3?? I’ll be protesting at the Venezuelan embassy to demand PEACE not WAR 🕊️ #StopTheWar

“Why has virtually every country in the world seen an abrupt rise in extremist politics, especially on the far-right, starting at approximately the same date the iPhone was released” The most important question in politics but maybe not a hard one

Russian fascism is engaged in an existential civilisational battle against liberal democracy, with the Ukrainian working class acting as the first line of defence for Europe. Material support for the Ukrainian armed forces is class solidarity. Arming Kyiv is anti-fascist praxis.

By the by, there ARE currently some pretty hard men and women fighting far away from the United Kingdom against a powerful threat... and Elon Musk has turned off their Starlink access when they got too feisty.

We need to do ultra-masculine fascism, like in J.R.R Tolkien's famous book, "Lord of the here's why Ultra-Masculine Fascism is evil, stupid and self defeating. Under no circumstances do it you fucking clowns."

Being a moderate because many of your policy positions and beliefs fall short of the more radical ideas held by many activists on the left and right is fine. You do you. Being a moderate because you chose middle ground positions you think will poll well is fake and weird. Touch grass.

As Sultana and co know very well, it is perfectly possible to support a people's struggle for national freedom while opposing the govt or political leadership currently at the head of that struggle. They do not apply this here for a simple reason - they do not support Ukraine.

I became much more pro-Palestine when I saw how Israeli and Russian militaries & their boosters used the same excuses - down to the precise meme format - to murder children

I despise the type of American "anti-imperialist intellectual" who has the gall to travel to Europe to condescendingly lecture us on how we are nothing but puppets who need to accept being the playthings of entities like Russia. I don't even know why we let people like Jeffrey Sachs enter the E.U.

Half the major parties in the United Kingdom appear to be in a desperate arms race to see who can be performatively cruel enough to foreigners to earn a "based" quote tweet from Elon Musk.

as I have said before, the fact that the provision of access to 'girls' (18-24 year olds) is a form of favor trading in the world of rich men is both a) gross and b) cover for worse

It's almost funny that the same people who screeched that Ukraine is a nation of Nazis for years, are now literally defending an SS tattoo. Almost. The blatant cynicism then makes me want to vomit.

the conversation we should be having is that AI is developing and will certainly displace many workers, and we should develop government programs to even out the losses and gains between workers and capitalists. but instead we argue about whether a trans person was on netflix

I'm going to guess that if Russians are actually going to freeze this winter, the same people who were completely silent when Russia targeted the Ukrainian energy infrastructure, will theatrically decry it as the greatest humanitarian catastrophe the West has ever caused or some other bullshit.

The regime falls falls when the security services have to make a choice about whether or not they want to club Grandma and the normies. They will club black bloc protestors all night long and 60% of the country will cheer for it like braying dogs. So, to repeat, what's your plan?

During the cold war the KGB had a huge stockpile of rare metals in warehouses for wartime production. When the cold war ended, it disappeared, illegally sold through St. Petersburg. Most likely by crooked former KGB agents. Guess who worked as a metals trader in Russia at the time? Farage.