Basically, the thing to understand why there are so many Tradcath converts in educated conservative circles is that there is intense demand there for a form of right-wing Christianity less embarrassing and low status than fundamentalist Evangelicalism.

They couldn't say that what he'd done was wrong per se -- they'd been saying the same thing, themselves, and of course the public believed it was wrong! So, they called it incompetent, asleep at the wheel, and then every normal gaffe, normal downturn, became unfalsifiable evidence thereof.

notably, this was also true in afghanistan. Biden made the right choice of humiliation, and the press crucified him for it. 1

when we mourn le guin, we mourn one of our greatest writers & thinkers. but we also mourn one of our all-time greatest haters

But who can deny that Comey is reaping what he's sown? Indeed, this is justice (what is deserved) for his crimes in the 2016 election. Comey's intervention against HRC, in service of playing both sides with a fascist movement and political party, uniquely led us all to Trump. That that movement...

My own intuition has been that the US needs to lose one of these things decisively, Suez-style, to be shaken from its delusions. But if anything, the US military has become remarkably adept at disguising slow-boil strategic defeats as tactical victories just long enough to deceive the public.

Obviously this is Bad and they shouldn't be allowed to utter Lincoln's name, let along touch anything named for him. Even so, we could do with feeling a lot more shame and self-disgust, instead of convincing ourselves perennially that we're temporarily embarrassed enlightenment liberals.

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them--as steps--to climb beyond them. He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.

having the opportunity to feign surprise and drop this line would give me a kind of high no drug could reproduce

In Soviet California, Jupiter devours Saturn!

I went to have cocktails to celebrate the giant meat grinder but then someone turned on the giant meat grinder and it was really loud and scary. and you're laughing

People here are being really shitty, including at fellow journalists who might have been startled just a moment before biting into a big fully dressed hot dog. Journalists who may have reflexively squeezed the bun and sent the sausage sailing across the room into the delicate champagne tower

I had dinner with Nazis and all I got was this cheap thrill.

In nine hours the national press corps will raise their glasses to the most racist person in the country and claim it’s a “work dinner” for “source building”

This looks like those Old West photos of the Texas Rangers posing with the corpse of the outlaw they killed

This is treating Trump v. United States as law. It is not law. It is anti-law. It belongs in that category of Supreme Court decisions which were not merely wrong, they were illegitimate and non-binding from the day they were issued. It is owed no more respect than Lincoln gave Dred Scott.

it is important to emphasize that this was *the point*. this was *intentional*. elon musk is a vicious white supremacist who thinks poor african children ought to die, so that the world can be whiter

Correct.

Hamilton, the musical, was state-sponsored propaganda.

With the help of the Sandy Hook families, The Onion has reached a long-awaited deal to take over InfoWars. We've enlisted the help of @timheidecker.bsky.social, who will be InfoWars' Creative Director. Please stand by for more.

This is a criticism that people like @alanrozenshtein.com need to attend to more seriously. Two decades into the social media revolution, what can we say that the *lack* of regulation during the innovation phase actually delivered? Why then should we expect an unregulated AI landscape to prove out?

It's fun to say "Breaking Bad is a story about American health insurance", but it's obviously crucial to Walt's self-obsessed obstinance and resentment that, principally, Gretchen and Elliott, also his actual family with Hank and Marie (or Walt's invisible mother!) are right there waiting.

JD Vance talks about theology with the confidence that Silicon Valley types make macro-economic forecasts

legitimately crazymaking (not to mention quite instructive) that the truly revolutionary tech of our time—vaccines above all, but also ventilation gains, solar capture, & battery storage for starters—get none of the breathless PR of overtly harmful tech & often is being actively being fought against

The most interesting part of Alien3 (remember, the title is ‘Cubed’, placing it literally out of sequence with Aliens) is sorting out *why* Fincher treats Aliens’ resolution—Ridley as Newt’s adoptive mother—as a fleeting dream, destabilizing the plot’s relationship to Ridley’s series biography.

If Blockbuster Video had thought they could make $5 by selling the list of everyone who rented Schlinder's List to the KKK they would've done it in a second. It's not like evil corporations didn't exist back then!

GOP has lost all subtext with this beer hall Putsch, huh

Pope: [moral critique of illegal war] President: I am Jesus. Thr pope is gay Media: they are feuding😳

The head of the FBI isn't supposed to be getting blackout drunk. He's supposed to be cross-dressing

the president of the united states is personally looting the treasury to the tune of literally billions of dollars and that he is not being immediately removed from office and tried for high crimes against this country is a devastating indictment of every part of our political system

JD Vance wants to get excommunicated so bad, it'll be the "cancellation story" that launches his pivot into Evangelical superhero

Love for allergy season to begin a month early. An actual waking nightmare: sinuses so swollen my upper teeth feel like they're about to fall out.

The most bad-ass rebuttal from Tite Kubo, the author of Bleach.

this being the thing that crosses the line for many rightwingers is so illustrative of how they don’t really care about anything real that actually matters. their problems are all entirely fictional

I genuinely believe that people don't appreciate just how much of all the bad vibes right now are still largely a COVID hangover. It was a profoundly traumatizing event for American society, on the order of the civil war or the great depression and we've largely decided to just pretend

more seriously congrats to the hungarian people for kicking that asshole out

Again there's simply no comparison between the scope, scale, & tone of the JOE BIDEN EPICALLY AND INCOMPETENTLY FAILED IN AFGHANISTAN coverage of August/September 2021 & the "just the facts, very measured" reporting of what's going on with Iran & Trump now.

A sad update from the peace talks in Pakistan: after 21 hours of discussions with JD Vance, the Iranian delegation have killed themselves

Hard not to think Sasse got to see his Dorian Gray picture.

Contrary to public perception a huge % of pregnant teenagers in the 1990s were impregnated by adult men. The younger they were, the larger the average age gap between mother and father was. Fixing teen pregnancy was in part a clampdown on statutory rape. That's what conservatives want to reverse.

Not 100% on this, but that Natalie Portman Tiffany’s ad might be evil incarnate. A living abomination.

The number of maskless assholes on this plane, unselfconsciously hacking away.

Every now and then someone tries to argue Lynch was a reactionary and it's like, get da fuck outta here

Yah but I'm goin crazy out there at the lake.

“Studies suggest youths are more empathetic and less narcissistic than in the past, as well as more open-minded and inclusive. Drug use is down, youth violence has dropped and teen pregnancies have declined.” It’s almost like panic abt kids’ wellbeing serve existing adult demands for control.

I cannot keep track with how many notifications I'm getting from all over Beirut and south Lebanon right now of the places that Israel is obliterating. There are multiple reports of multiple massacres in the past hour alone.

Hard to admit: this is Good, Actually, as a nuclear Iran may be the only thing to check Israel’s ongoing campaign of genocide.