They're stealing billions of your money to pay off violent right-wing psychos while doing everything in their power to spike gas up to $5 a gallon, make groceries into a luxury and hand the country over to the oligarchs who want to permanently replace you.

Watching a series of former Confederate states rush to eliminate any vestige of black representation in the House pretty much answers the question whether the Voting Rights Act was still necessary.

I am very tired of the stupid-savvy 'oh you think politicians were honest before Donald Trump' take, like yes there has in fact been a qualitative change in the way modern american politics have been conducted that is largely attributable to him, and is bad.

look, like him or hate him, the clear _fact_ to be learned from the tattoo is that this is a man going through life with a chip on his shoulder and moths in his skull

they absolutely had a horse in the roman senate. that 100% happened.

I think a lot of people are underestimating just how politically radicalizing this stuff is, when you see what the right is getting away with, including with the blessing of the Supreme Court majority

Folks! Who do you think can apply for a low paying, high prestige job? It's neither average people (representative) nor salaried technical experts (massive pay cut). It's people who don't need the income!

I do think most of the political wishcasting on here about tactics and policy and rhetoric and strategy and reform is all sort of pointless because it's all downstream of the entirely unanswerable question of: "Will the current status quo of partisan polarization break or not?"

future linguist: “discourse bomb” is a corruption of “discordiae pomum,” the Golden Apple of Strife

(inventing social media) we want to start releasing DLCs for the DSM-5

We do need to acknowledge that a lot of the Biden Administration's timidity was because the public very much wanted to "get back to normal" in 2020. They demanded normalcy. A president who wasn't constantly making news. A country where things were relatively quiet & problems were handled in time.

The public asked for all this, got it, & quickly decided it was bad & dumb & we wanted the clown show back. So now we're here.

Good: Andor ESB Rogue One third act ANH ROTJ TFA first two acts TLJ A plot (Rey) mandalorian s1 Disappointing but entertaining: The Acolyte TLJ B&C plots Rogue One first two acts Mandalorian s2 Solo ROTS TFA act three Kenobi Actively bad: TPM Rest of the Filoni shows AOTC Utter Abomination: TROS

pro tips for EU5 province management:

I like how Schlock Mercenary deals with this: the monsters are the descendants of autonomous military tech that's gone feral

Schlock is borderline indestructible and can eat anything because he is the result of evolution starting from a hardened storage substrate that was engineered to survive the apocalypse and spent millions of years settling arguments by trying to eat each other

Also if all the Jedi Council where constantly doing Medici type schemes to get their various bastards into positions of power, it helps explain why none of them where too surprised to find out some jedi master nobody remembers had apparently raised a huge fuck-off clone army in secret.

Gene Wolfe was, besides being a hella writer, also the guy who devised the machinery that makes Pringles potato chips, something I didn't learn till after he died.

Gene Wolfe growing a Mr. Pringles mustache and Pringles later retconning history to “Mr. Pringles copied Wolfe” feels like something out of the “Sun” books.

Slightly diminish a book: East of a pretty great place

86 47

they’re already doing it to us; let’s see how they like it

i also remain amazed at how, all these years later, conservatives are still angry and aggrieved that barack obama extended empathy to a black teenager who was killed for no reason. shows you what is in their hearts.

World War I jumps to mind.

every new doohickey guy in 2025: all right. I'll do it. AI waifu Jodie Foster with H cups: I love you, onii-san

Don’t try to shoot anyone over it, which won’t help anything, but it remains absolutely true that Trump is an existential threat to America who should be removed from office as quickly as possible. He’s a sociopathic megalomaniac whose corruption and unfitness is unparalleled in history. Impeach

Those of us in the pro-democracy movement can and should hold both of these positions. 1. We unequivocally reject violence. 2. We will unequivocally oppose efforts by this administration to use last night as an excuse to try to suppress criticism and criminalize dissent.

solid death poem, good bushido, 10/10 no notes

(Failbetter Games voice):

on a really tangential side note, the phyrexian conlang is actually somewhat interesting because it's literally impossible to speak

a tangential note here is that the last major power war that the US entered had a level of public support that I cannot imagine existing within the next decade for, well, anything

the US has done the IRL equivalent of, like, an EU5 player trying to do a Ming Dynasty run and starting by trashing everything in the Yuan Empire

the longest one I can consistently do is "As I Walked Out One Evening," but I can often get all of "The Cremation of Sam McGee" and I could probably re-memorize "The Waste Land" if I put my mind to it always wanted to learn "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," of course

We should cast doubt on Joseph Smith imo

it's @aelkus.bsky.social's crackhead uber and we're all riding it (aelkus.github.io/problem/2020... for those unfamiliar)

it's in the replies of a much longer thread but this is actually the really crazy part about all of this

Helldivers from Helldivers 2:

Putin's problem was that he vastly underestimated the difficulty of occupying Ukraine's seat of power because he was getting information from compromised sources. But he looks like a genius next to the Trump administration, who don't even realize they need to do this.

people sometimes miss this in ASOIAF because the books are, admittedly, massive rambly tomes, but the Red Wedding causes seething resentment and distrust of the Frey-Lannister alliance _even among their other allies_

forget what i just said Andrea LaFlamme for Senator from Maine 2026 "She Can't Be Any Worse Than The Two Dems Currently Leading The Polls"

the Manitoban Candidate

in faintly related "Royal lines having weird things happen to them™" althist, my own favorite possible point of divergence is "the Habsburgs are slightly less racist against Czech nobility"

"At the very time when men appear engaged in revolutionizing things and themselves, in bringing about what never was before, at such very epochs of revolutionary crisis do they anxiously conjure up into their service the spirits of the past,

incidentally my read of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is basically (as I understand it) the same as Bill Riker's---it mathematically disproves the existence of the General Will with a very minor caveat if you are willing to allow that the General Will is literally insane

callout posts directed at Somhairle MacGill-Eain