Ben Shapiro and @ezrakleinbot.bsky.social were talking about this a week ago lmao. Absolutely shameless.

Notable, I think, that nobody actually seems that confident about, or even really interested in, securing a conviction.

Sorry, I'm confused. Who is this from, and should I be paying attention to it? The text gives me no information!

Took one week of unemployment for my circadian rhythms to get completely fucked up, so that's fun.

It's politically incorrect to say this, but 90% of this discourse is just the ongoing fallout from the breakdown of the patriarchal bargain, which is why it cuts across ideological lines, and why it's going to keep getting worse.

I mean, what is sort of absurd about this whole endless debate is that "whether liberals are nice or mean about it" is actually pretty irrelevant to the question of how Trump's economic policies are going to play out. It's just tone policing.

There is no incentive in the current American political economy and media ecosystems to ever say anything good has happened or try to improve anything, and I have no idea how you're supposed to try and enact progressive policies under those conditions.

It is absolutely fucking hilarious that people try to do Richard III apologism, a rank opportunist even by the times, who destroyed what his brother had spent decades building in just a few years. Nobody seems to have taken his bullshit claims seriously then, it's wild that people do now.

I see we're doing this discourse again. Have fun kids!

Wild how short these books are, given their influence. Lucy gets to Narnia on page six, and the whole book is less than two hundred pages! This is not a criticism.

I believe @carriepoppyyes.bsky.social is writing a book about this phenomenon, and I am both dreading it and looking forward to it.

Show trials can be opportunities for the opposition too, if handled right.

Nobody actually disagrees that Israel is an apartheid state at this point. The only argument is whether that's good or not.

I think the primary understanding of the post-WWII international order was that it is impossible for the US to actually withdraw from international affairs in any real sense, the modern world is just too small and we're too big, and unless that changes, we're going to be intimately involved.

You know, we read like Cicero and Tacitus and Sallust to understand Rome now, but do you think at the time they were like "Wow, just caught Gaius Brookius discussing current events down at the forum. Very insightful, he says this civil war situation is Complicated, and somebody oughta do something."

Reminded of the discussion in one of the Discworld books about the difference between art and dirty pictures; with the eventual conclusion reached that it's art if a vase is involved somehow. Or at least a nice plinth.

I am going to say that I actually do think that the threat of Russian nuclear escalation is something that has to be taken seriously, I just don't think that letting Russian aggression against its neighbors consistently go unanswered is actually any less destabilizing.

Every time I see anybody post about Evangelion it's a piece of information that was in no way, shape, or form actually ever explained by the text itself.

Do you think they're figuring out the problem with paying dangeld yet, or is this still a good bargain for them.

hmmm

I would have so much more respect for this movie if they just called it "The Mandalorian and Baby Yoda", as God intended.

Collection of American Civil War alternate history maps I've made, all of which at least try to do something a little more interesting than just a straight "what if the South won the war?" scenario.

I think the appetite for SCOTUS reform among the Democratic Party elite has been comprehensively exaggerated on here.

A thing that political commentators regularly do that drives me insane is to conflate coalition negotiations with extant, powerful constituencies and lobbies with preemptive and indiscriminate concessions in order to try and *create* those forces to negotiate with. Entirely separate things!

This is *stunningly* disingenuous, and the fact that Singal continues to enjoy a career writing at the highest levels about a topic that he either unwilling or incapable of discussing honestly is such an indictment of the Anglo-American prestige media.

JESUS: “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but My Father only." POLYPHEMUS: "Oh, not that bastard again. I thought I'd seen the last of him."

Proud to report that Goldwag's Gulch continues its long history of investment in underserved and developing parts of the world to encourage sustainable and shared economic growth!

Now that I have some free time I think I'm finally going to try and write that "revisiting Narnia after twenty years" blog post I keep threatening to do.

Do you Donald Trump knows the difference between Tylenol and vaccines.

Coincidentally, I just finished reading the White Space series and I have to say: Very, very good SciFi! Written in the best possible tradition of taking a bundle of tropes and ideas and then rigorously interrogating them from within, with some really lovely character dynamics and relationships.

This can't be like the FBI, where Republicans treat it as a purely partisan office, and Democrats respect their choices. If we're going to have a unitary executive, the next Democratic president should pledge to purge every single Trump appointee on day one.

Some important context for all of the "why are liberals refusing to engage in respectful debates with their conservative colleagues 😔" articles floating around.

Trump is uniquely degenerate as an individual, but I think when the historians are writing about this in a few centuries, they'll focus on the collapse of Congressional functionality from the 1990s onward and the growth of the security state post 9/11 as the primary motive forces behind the crisis.

There was a whole meltdown a few years ago on the "intellectual" Right about woke Tolkien scholarship, and it made me genuinely quite furious, in that it was quite explicitly formulated as an attack on the idea of complexity in literature.

Happy #MapMonday! In 1850, John C. Calhoun proposed that the South and North should each elect a Co-President with veto power over all legislation, to preserve the balance of power and prevent disunion. I'm sure this would have worked out great.

Marrying Abigail in STARDEW VALLEY is the best choice because it means that my children will inherit Pierre's store. This is good because it will represent my final victory over the old bastard, but also because it will secure a vertical monopoly on agricultural production and distribution.

A useful form of dialogue that would actually be very enlightening and intellectually stimulating would be if the @nytimes.com actually let somebody tell Douthat how full of shit he was, instead of paying his friends to nod solemnly at his bullshit. No joke, that's how this is supposed to work!

I've talked shit about JRR Martin's critiques of Tolkien before, so I think it's fair to say that what he says here is obviously, self-evidently correct, all of the children whining about it are missing the point to a literally insane degree, and it annoys me every time I see this make the rounds.

Ok, I'm just gonna say it, sorry, the decline in quality of the Old Man's War books is *incredibly* noticeable, and I increasingly feel like a lot of it is that the author used to push himself beyond his comfort zone as a writer a lot more than he does now.

Now that I'm unemployed I'm going to become even more relentlessly obnoxious about self-promotion on here, so fair warning to everyone. 😅

The fact that this thread has now turned into an argument about whether or not John Stuart Mill is responsible for the Holocaust should probably demonstrate why pointless these discussions are without an agreed-upon definition of "Liberal".

I find a lot of popularism discourse sort of stupid because America has a pretty open primary system,and if candidates that are more centrist on abortion can win, then they will. But everyone acts like there’s some central committee of pundits that has to say yes/no first and bless the whole thing

Every time we get one of these outbreaks I think just how fucking *annoyed* I would be if they turned out to be right.

It almost certainly is, but I genuinely doubt they're getting any more actionable information out of it than either his cabinet or the general public is.

The African-American veterans who gathered in 1887 to memorialize a leader in the “hopeless fight” for freedom and equality did not do so because they knew the arc of history bent towards them, or because they embodied the popular consensus, they did so because they did not. Dare we do any less?

Douthat has the same opinion as the rest of the conservative intelligentsia; liberal institutions and organizations do not conform to the Will of the Volk, and must be forced into line by government pressure. He's just better at saying it in a way that makes Ezra Klein nod thoughtfully.

UPDATED VERSION INCLUDING CONGRESSIONAL RESULTS! As well as various other cleanups, edits, and corrections.

It's a shame that Trump is so shallow and incurious, because it would be very funny to see how far you could push these dipshits.