Being a columnist is so cool. You can have absolutely no experience whatsoever and still drop whatever takes you want. Serve in the military? No? Work in natsec? No? Have an academic background in defense? No? Have any government experience at all? No? Who cares! Fire that column off anyways!

i looked at the methodology for this and it is a. sex addiction counseling group in texas did a surveymonkey and extrapolated the results to the entire us population which is the sort of research design that earns you an ff on an intro methods class (the extra f is for extra effort), and b. p-hacked

I’ve been looking around for the most credulous mid-campaign piece about Trump’s obviously fatuous Project 2025 disavowal, and I think it might be this one from Politico. www.politico.com/news/magazin...

If there was a poll about the shutdown that was like "60% of voters blame Democrats" we'd get wall to wall news "analysis" saying the Democrats must immediately capitulate or face electoral ruin, but when we have the opposite (like we do now) the media doubles down on efforts to blame Democrats

Saudi Arabia has a history of brutally executing talented writers who tell hard truths, which is why absolutely none of the comedians performing in Riyadh should fear for their safety

again its truly astounding how presidential mental fitness was The Most Important Issue but only for Joe Biden

…

Ezra Klein be like

headline in my inbox: "The War on Tylenol". Except that it isn't? It's a eugenicist war on pregnant people, blaming them and their medical caregivers for autism, which the eugenicists regard as a fate worse than death. Focusing on Tylenol hides that fact.

All over the world, there are young men who just want to kill: they seek a permission structure wherever it's convenient; doesn't matter much whether they pretend the permission comes from Islam or 4Chan, since the shooters have no real commitment except to violence.

NBC News projects: Democrat Adelita Grijalva wins the special election for Arizona House District 7. Grijalva will bring the important 218th signature to the chamber's Epstein files discharge petition — forcing Mike Johnson to handle a fight that has divided his conference.

Something I think we’re not talking about enough with all this autism bullshit is how, no matter what, it’s always blamed on the pregnant mother.

Don't think I've ever felt this embarrassed to be an American. There's shame and anger too. But mostly embarrassment. We're the laughingstock of the developed world. And we should be.

Still canceling Hulu after Alien:Earth finale tomorrow 🤷‍♀️ too little, too late from Disney.

Former counselor to RFK Jr’s predecessor:

Things were better when computer was in room. Now everywhere is computer. This is bad. Computer should never have escaped room.

me too, Bobby. me too.

Assuming CDC formally adopts ACIP's recommendations, CVS tells me it will provide Covid vaccines without a prescription in all 50 states and won't require even self-attestation of a qualifying condition — "it’s up to the individual patient." No confirmation from Walgreens or Walmart yet.

been very hard to watch a bunch of 50-year-old podcasters come to terms with having a job.

It's one thing for a random NY politician to make a quip like this but Jeffries is national leadership. He's the leader my own Rep in the House is supposed to follow. I don't think it's funny, I think Jeffries is undermining the whole party with this insult and by failing to endorse Mamdani.

I shouldn't be shocked, but I'm still always brought up short to realize how many people think "civility" means "white people speaking in relatively calm voices" no matter what vile shit they say.

When you become a civil, sober politics knower like myself, you understand that by noticing a bad person is bad, you become even worse than them. And they become good

The Nation pulls NO punches, from @espiers.bsky.social "There's no requirement to take part in this whitewashing campaign. Refusing to join in doesn’t make anyone a bad person. It’s a choice to write an obituary that begins “Joseph Goebbels was a gifted marketer and loving father to six children.”

This guy got fired from his sports reporting job for THIS post. This is easily, easily the most censorious period in my life. You can get sent to detention camps by the government for writing an op-ed or fired from your job for THIS type of post.

We have a bit of a natural experiment here. Compare the tone, quantity and duration of Charlie Kirk coverage with that of the two Dem lawmakers gunned down in their homes in Minnesota 6 months ago. May be revealing.

Pol Pot wiped out 25% of the Cambodian population, but forty years later, the Cambodian economy was stronger than ever. Could the same thing happen here?

It turns out that protecting hate speech did not create the conditions to protect other kinds of speech; instead, it protected hate and allowed hate movements to take over all the institutions of that might have defended the rest of us.

WELKER: Trump said tariffs were gonna spark a manufacturing renaissance but since he announced them the US has lost 42k manufacturing jobs. Is that proof tariffs are failing? BESSENT: We can't snap our fingers & have factories built W: The economy added nearly 500k manufacturing jobs under Biden

Darkly amusing that the president who pardoned Ross Ulbricht also says illicit drugs are such a threat to national security that he can use the military to assassinate suspected drug dealers with no due process.

damn that's crazy. hey what's all this?

think about how rotten your soul has to be, how broken your moral compass, to think drag queen story hour is a sign of social decay but snuff films of war crimes is exemplary, stand out, should be shared far and wide. these people are sick

Remembering when the NYT went on a weeks-long bender covering a decades-old real estate deal the Clintons were involved in, in which they *lost money*.

New plan: we get Obama to demand the death certificate

The New York Times ran a whole piece speculating that Joe Biden had Parkinson’s and suggesting his neurologists were lying to the public. archive.ph/0u9ht

I got the complaint in the horrific OpenAI self harm case the the NY Times reported today This is way way worse even than the NYT article makes it out to be OpenAI absolutely deserves to be run out of business

Meanwhile the sitting vice president talks about “Cultural Marxism” and “the Cathedral” and uses esoteric White Power jargon all the time but his language is not a liability

Words/phrases Democrats should never use: * bipartisan * my Republican friends * real, valid, legitimate, serious, important (to describe issue raised by Republicans) * yea (when voting on Republican bills) * distraction (to describe bad thing Republicans did) * woke (in derogatory sense)

normal people don't say "triggered" or "heteronormative," they say they gave their life to christ in a cracker barrel parking lot

ok so the times witnessed reporters receiving cash from Adams people three times at mayoral events and sat on it for over a month but couldn’t pass up a hot tip from a neonazi about Mamdani’s unsuccessful college application for long enough to check if the neonazi had already been identified

i am so sick of the dumbest people alive being in charge of everything and the second dumbest people alive writing opinion columns about how it's good

It is very annoying to have to share a community with jerks who believe terrible things! But that's life, the whole deal! Figuring out how to make society with people you loathe is the entire project of humanity!

The phrases are being slung around, so a clarification! Security guarantee: We will help you fight. Security assurance: We will not attack you. It looks to me like the first one is being used correctly in discussions of what Ukraine needs. The second is what Ukraine was promised in 1994.

The media lost its MIND when Obama tried to make some small changes to the press pool system. Now Trump is quite openly rendering it into a North Korea-esque state-media system and ... has a single journalist or outlet stood up to protest?

If pundits would like to talk about violence, a terrorist recently shot up the CDC and another assassinated Democratic officials in Minnesota but they sort of let both stories disappear Not as threatening as motorbikes in DC I know but maybe we could circle back?

A tough pill to swallow is that, no, our feelings are not always valid. Our feelings are all too often completely illegitimate, and we should just scoff at them, ignore them, and far from letting them fester or guide our action, we should deliberately act in ways that foster better sentiments.

it's wild to post this when a more realistic version of it actually happened and it was conservatives who refused the treatment