People will yell at you because they want to. I have been blocking people for years for yelling at me over things I never said or did. People have unlimited strangers on here to treat as proxies for everything that's wounded them. You don't have to engage with that.

What does this imply for those of us who are not Christian, and who labor under the assumption that we're protected by the First Amendment?

My wife told me that people not consuming a consistent diet of literature is why they struggle with empathy & putting themselves in the shoes of others & now I see it in everything. Nothing surprising about this guy beating his chest & proudly proclaiming that he doesn’t read though. No shit man.

specific guys aside—it is politically and morally bankrupt to be told we must seriously consider how many is too many pieces of nazi flair

Kristi Noem’s firing is long overdue. She oversaw vile crimes against humanity and we’ll never forget it. But until ICE is abolished and expelled from our communities, we keep fighting. Lawless federal agents kidnapping and killing people on our streets can never be normalized.

School shooter culture on a nation scale

Nearly every time I've been nominated for an award, the award itself shut down before I could win or receive it, like organization shuttered, natural disaster, person running the event vanished, a board member returned from abroad and now believes the concept of awards is morally wrong, plague, etc.

you probably know the famous quote about “Shouting ‘Fire’ in a crowded theater”- what a lot of people forget was that the judge who said that was trying to jail a Yiddish-speaking socialist for distributing anti-draft pamphlets (zines) during WW1 so yeah, zines are actually really fucking important

This is one of the curlers on the USA Paralympic curling team and I told him today that he should post about his Paralympic experience on BlueSky because people on BlueSky get very excited whenever anybody doing anything cool in the world posts through it on BlueSky instead of other websites

Amazing how all the current GOP group chats inevitably devolve into the worst Nazi aspects of 8chan, surely this isn’t a sign of what the party has morphed into

Strange men sitting in court surreptitiously dispensing advice is no way to run a Justice Department

This sounds like an ad, but it's about murder.

This will go down in history with My Lai, Kent State, and Czechoslovakia 1968. Killing little girls at a school in our name. What a dirty and war criminal government we have. They must face consequences. We must work to make them face consequences.

A white applicant with a felony conviction has a better chance of being hired than a Black applicant with a clean record. Because of racism.

The Democratic Party is starting to have a serious Hindutva problem and if you think Sinema and Fetterman were turncoats you have no idea what the mind of a sanghi is like

This doesn't mean that the general populace secretly *loves* us; I don't think that's true. But it does mean that for Dem voters, being anti-trans codes as Trump, and they don't want candidates who have that vibe.

I don't like making predictions, but this is exactly why I'm bearish on Newsom winning a primary (*unless* he dramatically changes course and re-re-re-invents himself), because the podcast bro nonsense--including the anti-trans advocacy--is going to be absolute poison for him.

One encouraging theme in last night's NC primaries is the simple fact that being pro-trans is now like being anti-ICE among Dem voters: to them, it means you're a fighter, it means you're not giving into Trump. That's a really, really good sign.

Not for nothing but “simply revels in bringing the high low” is a dispassionate summary of the Magnificat

What "it's a distraction" people fundamentally need to understand about fascism is that fascism's entire mode of operation is diverting popular anger/anxiety/despair into channels of violence against the Other (both internal and external). It's not flailing, it's the whole strategy.

my first book (2020) was about online neonazis and my second book (2024) was about christian theocrats. they gained strength, voltronned and became a government. my third book (2027) is going to be a history of notable sandwiches so i hope this means we will be governed by sandwichocracy

Thinking about the theory that Imperial Japanese Army atrocities were partly intended to, or at least had the effect of, making it impossible for their soldiers to safely surrender and thus be forced to fight to the death

One of them was a physician; the other was a guerrilla and a submariner, among a bunch of other things.

"One clause says that only the state has the right to promote “a system of symbols of Chinese civilisation”" civilisational discourse in action: as I've been saying, it's about claiming difference internationally and erasing difference internally.

If you think you can hold the Holy Grail without your hand shriveling up on contact with the Blessed Chalice, you must prove it. Pass the Chotiner Test

JUBILEE!

There was a moment during my oral exams where I started "arguing" with one of my committee members on a certain historiographical point. They told me later that was *the* moment I passed. It proved I was enough of an expert to disagree with a bigger expert in the field and back it up with evidence.

[2003 chant voice] no war for content

Trump is erasing history so he can whitewash the future of America. The regime wants to use US's 250th anniversary to justify taking away hard-won civil rights and freedoms, denying birthright citizenship to Black and brown Americans, and terrorizing our communities with modern-day slave patrols.

The leaked doc contains over 1000 exhibits about Black and Native history that this regime wants to erase form museums and national sites

Earlier this week, news broke about a subject we’ve been clear about for over a year now: the MAGA regime is set on erasing all the history that doesn’t validate their narrow white supremacist agenda (and that’s a whole lot of history). www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

Lethal crusader warfighters don't do stupid girl stuff like counting how much stuff you have.

Oops it turns out that using the infinite military budget as a way to just funnel money to billionaires has consequences! Whoops!

Imaging a human saying to you, "i will only ever tell you what i think you want to hear, based on what i know about ppl like you, how you start our conversation, & what you say during it. Sometimes that will sound like truth, sometimes like errors or lies. Now: Let's talk about your medical history"

It's quite normal for young soldiers to get dumb tattoos. It is not quite normal for young soldiers to get Nazi tattoos. Source: I was a young soldier and saw many of my fellow soldiers' dumb tattoos.

he outlines this massive surveillance society under the pretense that ethical, responsible people will be in charge, undermined by his effort to cement a permanent zealot kakistocracy in a country too corrupt to have working regulators or corporate accountability of any kind

Meta has a history of torturing their moderators and providing NOTHING in the way of mental health care. How do I know? Because I used to be a moderator for Meta and I got a $3,500 settlement for the PTSD they gave me. When we tried to unionize, they moved their moderation to the Philippines.

"Many of the highly educated experts who disagree with me constantly have a professional stake in saying I'm wrong," says man who has done almost literally nothing for the past decade besides pay his bills with "trans critical" op-eds.

I misremembered the timing. King was upbraided by the head of the RNC in 2018 for his repeated white nationalist comments, but it wasn't until he said he didn't understand why "white nationalism" was such a bad term in 2019 that he was booted from committees. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019...

It's an index of how much the GOP has radicalized since 2017 that the same party would ostracize King for saying things back then that today they would almost all endorse wholeheartedly (or at least condone). Then again, Steve King was the co-chair of Ted Cruz's 2016 Presidential campaign...so...

I'm teaching about early 20th century eugenics today and was reminded that 9 years ago Republican Representative Steve King was stripped of his committee assignments by his GOP colleagues for this post that simply states what is now bog standard GOP policy/rhetoric on immigration and "civilization."

once again I reiterate that I have never found a more effective barometer for "is this space safe for my fat cis body" than "show me your specific policies for creating a safe space for trans bodies" it has a 100% success rate everywhere from doctors to waxing to clothing-optional soaking pools

nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaa... Now look at figure 1-B. 44% of US adults between 16 and 65 were tested to read at level 3 or above. A combined 56% were tested to read at either level 1 or 2.

Like: part of being functionally illiterate is *not being able to perceive that things may be biased*. Not understanding that someone might be lying, or wrong. Half the US stock market is now tied to LLM's, which only appear impressive if you are functionally illiterate.

This is why even in non-written media, you see people having a difficult time perceiving subtext, context, the idea that the writer is writing for a specific audience with a specific idea in mind, etc. Because becoming functionally literate is *how* you learn to perceive all that stuff.

People tend to think of functional illiteracy as just being unable to read words aloud or such. What it *really* means is such as not being able to perceive subtext, context, understand who the audience of something may be, etc. Media illiteracy is fundamentally part of functional illiteracy.

This is one of the many reasons that fat people tried for years to get everyone to recognize that bodies don't exist to fit any aesthetic, that the size of our bodies doesn't make them or us(!) good or bad. Anti-fatness causes a tremendous amount of damage to a tremendous number of people.

every time someone shares a shitty op-ed piece by a shitty writer in [insert legacy media org here] to dunk on it, they should have to share something made by someone awesome

I told you so forward.com/opinion/4316... religiondispatches.org/2019/09/23/t...

What we are seeing is a deliberate, well-funded campaign to make transgender Americans second-class citizens—without legal protections and vulnerable to state violence.