1990S SCREENWRITER: oh yeah you basically always have to make the families in these movies be ultra-rich in a completely unremarked on way because otherwise it feels bad when Beethoven fucks up their car. but it's not like anyone is going to let that warp their entire worldview! ah ha ha

Murder.

Saw Relay, 2/3s of a great, spare, lonely thriller about a man slipping between the blind spots of the capitalist surveillance state. Great, largely sIlent performance by Riz Ahmed. Third act twist turns it into a more conventional action movie. Disappointing. Should have stayed austere and sad.

Palantir. Sauron. CyberDyne. Blackrock. Mr Beast Inc. Cerberus. Blackwater. Anduril. Citizen. Citadel. Gilead. Bain Capital. Darktrace. Oracle. Umbra.

Insane fascist propaganda. America's foreign aid budget was a rounding error as a percentage of GDP before Trump eliminated most of it. And many of the wonders of the modern world invented since the moon landing were created by immigrants to the United States.

This, combined with "vice signaling" (taking pride in antisocial behavior) has given us the reign of the Stupid Asshole, something most people are against, but can only be remedied if we're not too polite to talk about it

These people are stupid.

Grim that in 2020 we could have gone down a very different social-democratic road but 35-45% of US society experienced a momentary slowdown of treats and in response went bugfuck insane

Maybe, as a country, we can agree this is not a legitimate way to decide the meaning of the constitution

Maybe our politics shouldn‘t be driven by the worst guys’ wanking anxieties.

The leadership of the @nytimes.com broadly agrees with Chris Rufo that the existence of "woke" students, professors, and institutions is an affront to society which needs to be dismantled by state coercion. This is, ironically, very obvious, but also politically incorrect to talk about in public.

Someone who is good at photoshop add him to this picture of the 2003 NBA Draft Class

In September 2023, Lilian Weng, then Head of "Safety" at OpenAI, used her public Twitter account to announce how ChatGPT could be used as a therapist, and encouraged users to also use it as such.

In the tight job market of 21-23, teenagers were increasingly being recruited into these type of fast food retail jobs because employers couldn't find more qualified workers, growing the labor market. Now in the Trump job market, highly qualified professionals are being shoved down into these jobs.

My theory is that PTA's Pynchon is distilling the Hegelian dialectic into what amounts to dueling aesthetic systems of people who have money vs those who have house plants

While the Christmas day attack in Nigeria got a lot of attention, AFRICOM conducted airstrikes Dec. 22-25 in Somalia. No casualty numbers shared, no other details, but AFRICOM confirmed in multiple releases. More than 120 strikes in Somalia this year, more than any previous.

Went outside and joined my local anti-ICE response, got some training, got gassed but got in the cops' way. Also organized with my neighbors for traffic safety improvements and started teaching Sunday school. The world is hard, but you're stronger and braver with other people. Go find them

there’s a kind of person who funnels all their moral impulses toward animals and reserves basically none for people… and in fact their work for animals actually seems to function, in their mind, as a karmic source of credit they can draw from in being actively evil toward certain humans

Yes.

This is why bike commuting to a job maybe seven miles away got me in the in the best shape of my life.

Streamers delenda est.

some of the more insidious consent manufacturing i've ever encountered. subtle enough that you might ingest a few ideas before realizing the whole point of the piece is to tell you that being raped and killed by heartless, soulless thugs is fine, actually, and you like it.

RIP Claudia Cardinale. Much like Robert Redford, she was a rare case of a beautiful performer with a filmography full of bangers who did NOT become right-wing later in life. Here she is punching fascist Brigitte Bardot in the face in Les Pétroleuses (1971).

Bodes ill, I reckon.

much of fitness culture in the US was developed by people who literally entered sports and physical education instead of going to therapy and the attitudes around intensity and effort kinda reflect that. the smiling Jazzercise folks were right and your football coach / PE teacher was wrong

post deleted but it’s abolish ICE now and always has needed to happen

In lieu of flowers please be reactionary in the most incomprehensibly French way possible

Republicans motivate their core voters to show up every cycle and they do. Democrats just assume their equivalent will do the same and spend the entire cycle pursuing swing voters, meanwhile depressing core turnout. Then they blame those core voters when they lose. The cycle must be broken.

average post politics guy is no different from a lumpen scribe who wants to suck the cock of a medieval duke

Even allowing for Branson being my friend, he’s my favorite Letterboxd reviewer and I think about this one in particular all the time

Teasing the Ode to Joy all film long then finally hitting it as hard as possible amid rainbows of low-angled lens flare when the *bad guys* triumph is one of the coolest things any action movie has ever done. Die Hard!

The "Three Pleasures of Edo" defined entertainment in Japan's capital: Kabuki theater with elaborate costumes, Sumo wrestling matches, and Yoshiwara pleasure quarter where courtesans provided sophisticated entertainment. These dominated cultural life from the 17th-19th centuries.

Look at this - pure New Look. Gorgeous

You don't need to be an anarchist to think that ICE should be abolished You can be a good governance liberal who thinks that the agency has demonstrated an institutional disrespect for the Constitution, and therefore advocate for unwinding the agency and rolling its functions into a revived INS.

I feel like "Mia" is one of the best places in Minneapolis. It is free to visit.

Is that good?

little Willy’s got problems with women

Because it's a good day, a thread of images from fantastic show I saw last week: African-American artist Allan Rohan Crite at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. First up, Crite's luminous "Streetcar Madonna," which resonates with incoming NYC mayor's pledge to make transit more affordable

There's actually a more recent historical framework for this exact argument than Roman law. But Vermeule chose not to cite the "Subjects and Citizens" chapter of Hitler's Mein Kampf for some reason!

We should ask why it’s so easy for terms and concepts like “Heritage American” and “Western Chauvinism” are met with earnest analysis and exploration while academic theory produced by Black scholars are summarily dismissed by people reading introductory texts if that.

my friend said the Budweiser Clydesdales were praying to Eywa and my uncle got so mad he had to go out into the backyard

The classic Bogart bike pic: jacket and tie, hand in pocket, non-chalant.

this isn’t even a political statement btw it’s a craft one. A plotless novel is fine. A choiceless one is bad.

Obviously I’m not saying people shouldn’t fight this, in fact I think we all have an obligation to. But it’s actually clarifying, I think, to start from the reality that Dems actively do not want to do the things that we want them to do. They love ICE, fracking, the $1T military, and tech money.

This is perfect. The DOJ's embarrassing snafu with disappearing redactions was the fault of Elon Musk. Musk cancelled government subscriptions to Adobe programs that would have made the redactions permanent. What a pack of fools.

who gives a shit!!!!!! the only thing I can imagine more dorky than bragging about your dad is bragging about your great grandfather. "my ancestors got to ohio and stayed there." pathetic

In his own way, Wurman's making the case for birthright citizenship. He tries so hard and yet comes up with nothing. If there was a there there, it seems he would have found it by now.