If you think you are reporting on a "Trump policy" pronouncement, you are not. There is no such thing.

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Sports bans aren't the destination, they're the foundation. Once you have a law that codifies trans girls as "male" for purposes of athletic competition, you have a precedent. And that precedent gets cited in the next case. And the one after that. Bathrooms. Passports. Employment.

One of the remarkable things about becoming a programmer is realising how different things could be in other industries. When I want to write a big app in javascript, I open my free, industry standard editor, and I add libraries from a cloud service I don't need an account for.

Politics isn't Bluesky's thing but Ursula von der Leyen has just given a big foreign policy speech to EU ambassadors condoning the US/Israeli war on Iran, announcing that international law and multilateralism are a hindrance to EU interests and basically recasting the EU as a security project.

The US can deny the school was the target, but this was also a either a double or triple tap depending on the source, with a group of children alive after the first hit, and then killed in the second after the parents had been called to collect them. This must be prosecuted.

I think part of the reason people don't understand fascism is that it's (very understandably) explored mostly through the lens of genocide and authoritarianism, with a lot less time spent on the fascists veneration of pride and will. Fascism isn't just an ideology of might makes right...

It does feel like we've memory holed the most important part of the Harris loss, to be honest. That she was only the candidate because the middle of the road, mainstream white guy was heading for a loss so unavoidable and catastrophic they had to try and turn that massive ship around fast.

The problem with "if you didn't vote for X, it's your fault we got Y" is not that it's untrue. It depends on who you're telling at and why. The problem is that as soon as you make this argument, you're basically saying that nobody is really allowed to even try to get another party off the ground.

'the charismatic species'

One way in which I've become more left-wing is the realisation that the financial markets are run by highly paid idiots who understand Trump less well than a random person in the street

I think we can only conclude that Tony Blair hopelessly fangirls over US presidents like a 60s teen meeting a Beatle.

Is it 'removing a dictator' if all that changes is the new dictator pays you bigger bribes?

Moderate liberals, for very good reasons, treat emphasising nuance as a virtue. But this becomes a weakness when confronted by events that are incredibly significant, and also morally clear. Some things are not clarified by enumerating the grey areas.

Oh you're telling me our enemies are barbarous savages, are you? How novel.

Could have done with more of these critiques of austerity at the time, it has to be said

This repeats yet another pattern from the Iraq War. When the Iraqis did not behave as the Americans wanted — without the deference and gratitude that a foreign military occupier felt it was due — they became targets.

Several of these violent men were out with LGB Alliance a few weeks back in Manchester.

Also by Hannan: “the blue eyed sheiks” of Icelandic Banking will save us (2004). Brexit will be a huge success and we won’t leave the single market (2016) “Covid won’t kill you” (2020)

I think there's a basic lack of awareness that the variable most likely to bring liberalism and secularism to a country is *stability*.

"No. Stop. This is terrible. Stop now" is a whole politics.

Many people seem to have trouble grasping that it doesn't matter *exactly why* some terrible people are doing terrible things. Nothing about knowing *exactly why* they are doing it will help stop them. They just need to be stopped from doing these things, which are terrible, in themselves.

Nothing says “we are liberating you from a bad regime to give you a better life” like bombing desalination plants and oil refineries

"Omnicause" was a lifesaver for people who haven't figured out yet that they're actually just quite right wing

Ope. Yea that’s a sieg heil

It feels like we've already found the everybody wins solution to this too. We bring them back at taxpayer expense and then make fun of them about it constantly.

One of the things about getting older and listening to young people is you realise the ”in the past everyone was unforgivably intolerant” perspective is a sliding timeframe that eventually covers your youth.

I feel like it would just take one Pokémon looking at Pikachu and asking “why doesn’t he need to live in the ball?” to lead to some fuckin changes in that society

Like, I really don’t want to be too cynical about journos but I’ve seen a lot of them discussing just how unplanned and poorly thought out this all seems, and I’m suspicious that partly the difference they’re feeling is that they haven’t been worked in advance enough.

I do think it’s interesting how this war shows the effect laying the ground actually has. Part of the reason this war has so few of the usual cheerleaders appears to be in no small part because they’ve skipped the months of media prep.

America has a long history of pointless and wasteful military adventurism. And in our quest to normalize Trump we’ve stuck his Iran war in that box: “another war, just like the rest.” It’s not like the rest. It’s an act of insanity, rogue state behavior. Don’t know how this ends until we admit it.

The problem with trying to take Platner in good faith is that he’s limited the range of possible interpretations to somewhere between “is an actual committed Nazi” and “knowingly had a Nazi tattoo for years and saw nothing wrong with that.”

I’ve been picking up the Gerry Anderson Supermarionation show Blu-rays after getting the new Thunderbirds 60th set and the Captain Scarlet set is gorgeous! The lighting, the camerawork, the miniature shots. Just incredible.

Americans: we live in a fallen state—embroiled by sin, cheating, lying, and evil. You cannot trust anyone, not even those who claim to know you best Canadians: I love my neighbors and my friends!

Untrue - the Convention provides both for the possibility that protection might cease to be necessary (ie the cessation clause: refugee status ends if there's a change in circumstances) AND the possibility it might need to be long-term (ie references to facilitating citizenship of the refuge State)

A man asked me last night what publishing needs to do for literary fiction to begin appealing to men again. I said, as nicely as I could, that, with over 2,000 books published every Tuesday, of which many would appeal to men, it’s not a publishing problem, it’s a men problem.

This is Koyuki. Please do not disturb her. She's in ice cream scoop mode right now. Needs to focus. 12/10 (IG: fuji_bull)

I am inherently very suspicious of the idea of "mask off" moments. Yes, people do sometimes reveal themselves, but often this is just a case of people letting one thing they don't like about someone lead them into a chain of bad faith assumptions. But this Platner guy...

It's very funny to me that Britain has a magazine called SFX that has been pretending to be called SEX for thirty years.

What do you get when you drop a piano down a mine shaft? A-flat minor.

I've been thinking about this in my field, programming, where I genuinely don't want to say condescending things but the people who claim to get good results out of it don't seem to be doing what I think of as good coding day to day anyway.

a technology that empirically erodes your executive function and critical thinking is not a hack for ADHD, what the fuck

The idea of tyrants getting in to power because they tell truths that the mainstream of their day won't isn't always untrue, but anyone trying to rehabilitate, say, Hitler because he made some correct claims about the mess Germany was in knows exactly what they're doing.

Kleines sampling von Yarvins Verteidigung seines „Hitler was right“ Posts:

Serious question here re: Iran’s nuclear program. Their defence has always been that this is a nuclear energy program, not weapons. Putting aside for a moment any intelligence saying they are developing weapons, is there a reason a country like Iran would want nuclear power so much?

I have plenty of criticisms of Starmer, and Labour has basically lost me as a voter, but I would like to say that Donald Trump’s opinion of his character or competency is somewhere near the bottom of this list of things I care about.

China is called the middle kingdom as in the center of everything. The Navajo word for the Navajo, Diné means "the people". It's extremely normal for a groups denonym for themselves to be self regarding.