ICE shot and killed a woman on camera today. We all saw the video. The Trump administration is lying.

In case you are wondering what has been going on in Bluesky the last couple of days, the White House has helpfully published a true account of recent events, putting them in their accurate, historical perspective. @kenwhite.bsky.social

The big influence of AVATAR on me has been that I really like that kind of near-future hard sci-fi aesthetic and never feel like I see it enough.

In the immortal words of General Peter Justice Black:

Twenty years from now Republican congressmen from Mississippi are going to be jumping and down screaming about the Danish menace, everybody will just accept that as a normal part of politics, and nobody will remember that it's because our idiot president didn't know what a Mercator Projection was.

I'm glad I went to a woke college where I was allowed to study writers like Plato, even if they were politically incorrect.

Good thread outlining the demographic basis of the Roman military machine.

Our Lord Jesus Christ, Only Begotten Son of God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; who came down from heaven and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man, will return in Avengers: Doomsday to judge the living and the dead, and His kingdom will have no end.

I have some real questions about how this intersects with the continuity of the movies, given that Peter Jackson cut out the whole decades-long interregnum where Aragorn captures Gollum and takes him to Mirkwood to be interrogated by Gandalf?

Could have put a gun to my head and I could not have told you what the character's (?) name was.

We gave stupid, belligerent children whose only mode of interacting with the world is oppositional defiant disorder control over the most powerful military machine in world history.

I don't know how to describe it, but there's this profound brokenness in the American body politic where nobody can take the implications of anything seriously. People keep saying things that should be existential threats to the political system, and then everyone just keeps going on as normal.

The first thing that happens in Narnia is that Lucy meets an informant for the regime who is then arrested by the Secret Police.

YOU'LL NEVER MAKE ME CARE ABOUT DARTH MAUL YOU BASTARD! NEVER!

This is just Kleinism; if enough people hold a reprehensible belief (and if enough of them are important) you are, definitionally, not permitted to treat it as reprehensible.

That's because the media likes him too.

Almost forgot about #MapMonday! The premise for this one is that the American Colonization Society got a lot more support and funding early on, and then things got out of hand.

If the biggest donor to the DCCC/DNC ran a website where you could use AI to take women's clothes off I feel like there'd be a demand for Dems to give the money back.

The most interesting aspect of the Emberverse books (and the best things about S.M. Stirling's writing in general) is the focus on ethnogenesis, and the series suffers a lot later on as the new groups it introduces are just pure historical recreations with fantasy elements.

Ok, but has anyone done Robin Hood vs King Arthur yet?

Yesterday we went up another percentage point towards our goal. Reminder that 40% ($200k) is an important milestone where we'll be able to finally bring on an editor full time. If you're looking for a moment to make an impact, this is that moment! gofund.me/0702ba937

They got a lesbian flag up at the DMV.

I don't seem to have any haters and it makes me feel left out. 😔

Will Stancil also does not have not bizarre politics, he is a bog-standard progressive who takes it seriously and is also way too online, it is *extremely weird* that this is considered beyond the pale of comprehension by the pop-left posting class.

Just to be clear, what he's talking about here is that Will Stancil said Bush spent more time trying to justify the Iraq War than Trump did the attack on Venezuela, and Sky said that Venezuelan oil probably wasn't worth profitable for US investment.

Everything is bad but I am still so fucking excited that somebody made an Order of Battle based on a story I wrote!! 🤩😍🤩😍

FUCK YEAH NEW EDGE OF MIDNIGHT

Lot of discourse about "hegemony vs. isolationism" etc, right now; I think that an actually stable and coherent liberal democratic world-system is going to have to involve multipolar partners under the same ideological umbrella, just to actually make a system of international law viable.

Everybody has only one mode of reacting to everything now, and it's unbridled rage. Suboptimal, in my opinion.

Have backed myself into a corner in this article I'm writing by suggesting that I can explain the Book of the New Sun, a task that nobody has ever actually accomplished.

Say what you will about Big Jim, but every single vehicle design in these movies has absolutely slapped.

I think 21st century Great Power competition is going to be kind of a throwback to the 18th century, in that is going to pretty non-ideological and mostly between dynasties (and, in this round, interest groups and oligarchs) rather than primarily between nation-states, per se.

In a lot of ways he was more of a tribunician dictator than a monarch, in the way we think of it, or that a lot of his successors would.

Everybody on here is putting more thought into this than a single person in the administration or pentagon has.

This is the same issue as David Weber and HONOR HARRINGTON except that he wrote twenty-three books instead.

ICYMI: In 1922, the man who overthrew the Sultanate, led the Ottoman Empire into WWI and presided over the Armenian Genocide died in Central Asia, leading Muslim rebels in a cavalry charge against Soviet machine-guns. How on Earth did he end up there?

I actually think comparing James McMurtry's Bush songs to his Trump songs is really interesting; his Bush-era music is furious and strident, crackling with incandescent rage at the people who've stolen our country. His new political songs are just sad and broken, mourning what we've decided to do.

What.

Ah well, nevertheless.

Woof woof woof, bark bark bark, arf arf arf.

They are assuming that the balkanization and polarization of American public opinion means that you can just do anything you want and it won't make a difference.

i'm in my farce era. i'm farcepilled. i'm farcemaxing.

The reason you go scorched-earth on this is the same reason we should have gone scorched-earth on impoundment; you can't stop it from happening, but you absolutely need to stop it from becoming a normal part of politics. You have to draw a line.

again as farce again as farce again as farce again as farce again as farce again as farce again as farce again as farce again as farce again as farce again as farce again as farce again as farce again as farce again as farce again as farce again as farce again as farce again as farce again as farce

Both YOJIMBO and HIDDEN FORTRESS are just straight-up hilarious.

The whole era of 1917-1923 is really so much weirder than anybody remembers now.

It is worth being explicit here; Lyman Stone's views on race are more acceptable among the American intelligentsia and commentariat than Will Stancil's.