“Just why Mr. Frodo was selling his beautiful hole was even more debatable than the price.”

Our lack of police training is so glaring it’s basically visible from space. And ICE’s training time for new recruits is now down to 6 weeks.

shadowlands is a good movie but a movie about C.S. Lewis' decades-long relationship with the mother of his friend who was killed in the trenches would be better. he *also* called her mother, notably, and they were probably sleeping together.

Police are like a box of chocolates. They'll kill your dog.

the chengguan beat the dog of a colleague to death on the street in Beijing for no reason other than sadism

I tried to Google the original story but I forgot Google is unusable now

tolkien: legolas and gimli were deeply bonded, if you understand me. achilles and patroclus. david and jonathan. jack and mrs moore.

Seen some people suggesting the new shooting video is AI because you can see a dinosaur in the background at one point. But, uh, there’s just a dinosaur on a car on that street. Here’s Google Street View. maps.app.goo.gl/fmgYaLWrwxx3...

If this bizarre pacted transition in Venzuela continues, in the near future we should expect: (a) coup attempts, (b) mutinies, and (c) insurgencies. I expect these to be related, for example, failed coup makers and mutineers head for the jungles to link up with ELN and dissident FARC guerrillas.

rw press is using the fact that the shooter, an immigration officer, is married to a much younger recent Filipino immigrant whom he apparently met in the Phillipines as proof that he is not a racist. that is not what i would determine from that fact pattern. i would FOIA 911 calls at his address.

I grew up around hordes of guys like young poor JD Vance and then I went to college with hordes of guys like petulant striver JD Vance. I can tell you both groups are consistently prepared to endorse violence when a “fucking bitch” doesn’t obey. The difference is merely decorum.

For a literal decade the official CBP policy has been “don’t stand in front of or behind vehicles” because the decade before that their internally commissioned studies found that agents were putting themselves in front of vehicles so as to shoot the occupants

Just remembering what his bishop told a family friend of ours, also a priest, when he started doing same-sex weddings in private in the early 1980s “Do be careful, dear”

What I’m finding most amazing is how much they hate being followed or observed. They run as soon as the whistles go off

but to see a woman say with kindness "I'm not mad at you" before being murdered by state authorities, who have now gone on to claim her killing was just and right, and we're here making the case she was acting with righteousness and killed unjustly this is just Martyrdom

if a Democrat had said “I can’t wait to host the oil companies at my 90,000 square foot golden self-commemorative ballroom that I tore down the White House and solicited $300 million in bribes to build” it would literally be considered the worst scandal and gaffe in human history

Being in a beguine house was your best life as a medieval woman like at least eighty percent of the time.

our society protects white women like it does fetuses. theoretically and from a distance, until they become an actual person, at which point they are too much of a hassle and probably deserve all the bad things that happen to them

Was in the coffee shop today when a guy’s boyfriend came in and gave him a quick affectionate little kiss and I felt both a joy at living in a time and place where that love is normal and public and a rage at those who would try to take it away from us.

I'm looking at the data for a column, and "abolish ICE" is both a lot more popular than you probably think, and a lot more popular than it has been in the past, including 2018

new all time reaction image just dropped

Every description I read of Pathologic makes out that it’s surreal and brutal but based on travel experience it seems slightly nicer than the average town in mid-2000s Siberia.

i know people like to clown on this place for some of the absurd behavior witnessed on here but it really doesn’t hold a candle to tiktok, where some random guy with a large following is claiming that i stole “abolish ICE” from him, and that no one had said it prior to like 2024.

got a phone call from my father tonight, first asking how we were doing here in portland, and second, ranting about how he saw people killed at kent state, and third he and his extremely religious wife talking about renee good as a martyr, these people are late 70s oklahomans

Remembering today that having your heart broken is a necessary step on the path to becoming fully human. Whichever heartbreak is your first, it’s probably critical that a state break your heart so that you can develop a political imagination. If this is your first, I’m sorry and also welcome.

These people know what they are doing. We know what they are doing. We know why. It's disgusting and shows their lack of decency and real values.

I have to say, as a man with two mothers, I find the derisive deployment of language like "lesbian" and "lover" by those on the far right who are trying to justify Renee Good's death particularly disgusting and dehumanizing. These women. They are wives. They are a family. That's it.

what sohrab ahmari wants most of all is a boot in his face

I think social media is a lot like alcohol in that it’s not great but most people can use it semi-responsibly but for a smaller set of people it’s going to ruin your life

And the nuclear-grade resentment/confusion that privileged people feel after a fall from celebrity grace is the most potent soil for growing seeds of depravity. Prime examples being every second tech CEO and A-list comedian. 'You don't worship me anymore? Well now i HATE you.'

One of the most irritating internet rhetorical tics is the “clearly they were a bad person all along ” thing; our personalities are far more malleable than that, I fear, and Linehan is the purest expression of how tiny character flaws within the norms of normal views can get negatively reinforced.

/8 A huge part of what makes it very hard to convict Jonathan Ross for murder was baked into America generations before Trump was President. That’s the primary factor that lets law enforcement kill with impunity, not Trump. Dick Wolf has killed more black men than Leopold II.

/7 Prosecuting a cop for misconduct, let alone murder, is the hardest prosecution you can do in America. Thanks to America’s culture it’s like trying to convict a fucking kitten for high treason. It’s like trying to convict Jesus. You just cannot rush over confidently into that.

/3 It’s nice to have crime on video but there is a great danger of video making a prosecution overconfident and complacent. I won a prison riot case years back when I was on the Indigent Defense Panel because of that — the prosecution was overconfident in the video.

/2 There was a broad consensus in 1992 — among people like those likely reading this thread — that the Rodney King video inarguably showed illegal police brutality. The cops were acquitted. LA burned. For multiple reasons the jurors didn’t share that reality or perception.

Here’s a comment for the people who are upset that MN hasn’t charged Jonathan Ross already: If you just Leeeroy Jenkins this shit you will lose and you will empower fascism and murder. It is indescribably hard to prosecute cops for murder. It is even hard when the murder is ON VIDEO. /1

In the Upper Midwestern province of Minnesota, the locals traditional culture of hospitality is disappearing under state repression

@catacalypto.bsky.social do i need to have played previous pathologics to play 3 or is having watched hbomberguy videos enough

I was visiting someone for work when that happened and I walked in on the family praying for the survival of the people in that little submarine. Regular people are just not accustomed to seeing stuff like that and they empathize a lot with people whose faces and voices they hear and see.

These are clear the people who watch a lot of stuff videos, because for *normal* people, seeing the face and hearing the voice of a person who died is very traumatizing. Remember, the **average person** actually thought that deep sea Titanic thing was very sad.

Finally some good news.

"You think of all your neighbors as just scum upon the earth And you live inside a bubble where a badge is all you're worth All your dreams are built on loathing All your hopes are built on hate I can't see any way out of this hell that you create" www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncuc...

It's more general than that! LLMs will turn into nazis if you just train them on *insecure code*. It's like there is an amorphous "badness" attractor that pulls learning systems towards it no matter which angle they enter from. arstechnica.com/information-...

Wrote about the tendency of some to file away all inconvenient facts in a drawer marked ‘forgetting'. www.forthedeskdrawer.com/p/political-...

This is also why I find it so maddening when reactionary centrists spend their time debating what trans people "did" to draw the ire of the right. It's completely backwards from reality. The right latched onto the issue because it's a gateway drug to every other form of bigotry!

satan is real (byproduct of algorithmic indoctrination.)

Minneapolis has General Winter on its side.

there's a lot of good people on the Labour backbenches, and - although inevitably a lot of them will lose their jobs at the next election - I am not entirely bereft of hope for the party in the long term.

you know how if you try and make LLMs more racist, they also end up more sexist and pro-genocide? this is the human example of that. evil isn't a single thing, if you start down one path you keep ending up at the same destination.