He has absolutely no memory of Kirk ever existing.

300 sequel but it's the Battle of Leuctra: Oh, you Spartans built your whole military hegemony on a tiny irreplaceable caste of elite warriors? Be a real shame if half that caste got wiped out in just one battle...

I do find it funny how so much male gaze pop culture history about Rome is obsessed with painting them as inspired military geniuses when the real lesson of Roman expansion, including in the Punic Wars, is that military genius ultimately fails against an infinite supply of reliably average soldiers.

"the future's bright, the future's Lib Dem"

I can remember a Guardian piece a few years ago with discussions with NHS gender staff, and the suggestion that some patients were "rushed" to prescriptions after 2 appointments, and the staff were like "Yeah, when they've been getting private care for 2 years already, what's left for me to assess?"

This is the constant transphobic contorted line, including in the Cass Review: that any deviation from forced gender conformity with a kid's AGAB throughout their whole childhood is to be regarded as an unnatural "intervention".

Lmao

Vive la République

A widely underacknowledged dynamic of the rise of far-right parties is how strong *anti-far-right* sentiment is by country.

Buried details: the 18% of kids whose identities shifted over the course of the study were overwhelmingly between binary trans and non-binary or vice versa. The number who shifted between binary cis and trans was very low indeed - out of a subset of 254, precisely *one* kid shifted in this way.

Though I'm sure that if Jack Lyons was someone who UoY students had actually heard of, they'd have found a way of changing it...

Eh, tbf universities memorialise a lot of people who were fucking nobodies. Donations are in large part a way for rich nobodies to simply purchase building naming rights for themselves. Often being a nobody more reliably ensures those monuments survive, b/c no-one cares about getting rid of them.

Called the inevitable problem with the space Your Party was trying to occupy on the day after the election, fwiw.

Tatiana Maslany posted an image on Instagram “with text overlaid that says “cancel your @disneyplus @hulu @espn subscriptions!” Marisa Tomei, who played Aunt May in Spider-Man movies distributed by Sony & Avengers movies from Disney, reposted a call to “unsubscribe and boycott” Disney platforms.”

I honestly think this weird attempt at beatification is something that probably actually worsens memory of Kirk in the longer term. Like, you're demanding the building of statues that are absolutely getting torn down in deliberately derogatory fashion somewhere down the line.

A few months after this article, John Kerry confirmed that Bernie's position on settlements being illegal was also that of the Obama administration, and indeed that there had been no formal change to this being the official US position since 1978.

Aside from the ideological socialist imagery and language of the first generation of Israeli political leaders, a lot of Holocaust survivors in Israel retained a certain soft spot for the Soviets due to the Red Army's role in defeating the Nazis, the liberation of Auschwitz, etc.

Again, the reverse of this would be the BBC giving special live coverage to the funeral of Aaron Bastani.

entire press has gotten bullied into treating charlie kirk as if he was one of the most important americans alive and not a modestly popular podcaster

It's a similar dynamic with so many social issues - people obsess against an imagined extreme position while the "compromise" in their mind approximates the already existing status quo. Similar story w/ abortion - lots of people with "compromise" views basically support the Roe v Wade position.

currently at record-high search interest for canceling disney plus. pulling kimmel is a bigger deal to the company's bottom line than any of the "woke" scandals of the past 5 years. i think news & entertainment corp execs need put more work into understanding their audience, & get off twitter

Not a widely known fact but you can in fact bring more than one flag to a protest.

Also, this shouldn't need saying, but the tankie line of "All true left-wing politics in Central-Eastern Europe is pro-Soviet, all Soviets are essentially Russians, everyone who disagrees is a Nazi" is also precisely the line that CEE Neo-Nazis ardently push and would *love* everyone to internalise!

The core American right-wing reactionary cannot be satisfied because they already are as satisfied as they're ever going to be. All the coherent things that they claim to want, they already have. Everything beyond that is just base aesthetic aversion to stuff that they find vaguely annoying.

I actually don't remotely care about "this is is why this transphobic thing is also bad for cis people" takes, being able to relate to someone else's suffering is just how empathy works.

Never knew the US government distributed free chewing gum.

The whole "mini-primary" idea was the brainchild of load of Very Serious (Democratic Party) People who all agreed that they would do things better but they weren't sure how exactly so they wanted to boot that question and responsibility to someone else.

Seems to me very apparent that Corbyn kind of fucked over Zarah with this whole thing, and yes she should probably just join the Greens

I like to call this phenomenon "Hestoning" b/c Charlton Heston is for me the most blatant example of someone claiming their move to the far-right was just everyone else moving and them staying the same despite it being verifiably false.

In other words, in all the thousands of athletics events that have taken place in the 20th Century, around 2 or 3 final competitors a year have been intersex women. Talk of the "integrity" of women's sport in this context is clearly just a euphemism for "purity", but they know that would sound bad.

Sidenote but a clear lesson of the past decade or so is that "business" reality shows are in large part cons and grifts in which people pretend to be businesspeople for the purposes of media attention. They should be taken off air.

Not to mention consider how this is all going to play out when there's inevitably another Andrew Malkinson...

"I wonder what the ideology behind calling a black man the N-word is?"

On scones, both jam-then-cream and cream-then-jam are wrong, because the correct approach is jam only.

"But now we shall both surely drown", said Sultana. "lol" said Corbyn, "Imao".

I have little hope of this happening, but I'd personally like to see blue states, or indeed other countries, consider hosting Free University of Berlin-style universities-in-exile from red states.

Literally the entire cause of the current American democratic crisis is reactionaries objecting to living with anybody else.

As always, the intent and effect of codified segregation pass laws is to police and restrict the subordinated group. The idea that bureaucratic hyper-codification of sex category in every aspect of life would ever be something that would help women and girls was transparent garbage from the go.

The whole inability to comprehend a difference between formal public officials and palatial service workers is very late Romanov vibes.

The Walking Dead had the big time skip in Season 9 to fit a triplicate of these, in order from most to least ethical: - Andrew Lincoln doesn't want to be in the show any more - Lauren Cohan is getting too visibly pregnant to ignore - We don't want to pay Chandler Riggs a full adult salary

Anyone voting yes is asking for a primary.

Desperately playing "senpai notice me!" to someone who is actually deeply unpopular in the UK even just with Tory voters.

Looking forward to watching "Poster: The Will Stancil Story" in cinemas in 2055.

Republicans are “Nazis.” Democrats are not “evil.” Democrats are not responsible for the murder of Charlie Kirk. Republicans are responsible for the murder of Melissa Hortman. Republicans are enemies. We’re Americans.

This is such a farce, and at this point I'll honestly be surprised if it ever gets off the ground.

"Why are you so focused on this thing that I'm also really focused on, instead of caring about this other thing that I also don't care about?"

What a weird nonsequitur