bluesky genuinely needs to rid itself of its giant-piece-of-leftoid-shit problem. I'd say "before it festers", but it already is festering mods fucked up, take your medicine and start cutting

I ran a subreddit for awhile and endorse this thread unconditionally. You have to weed your garden. Sometimes you have to even get rid of people who aren't breaking any of the rules but who are simply fucking with the vibe.

The two shots through the side window should be, in a sane world, what leads to this guy's conviction.

Here he is immediately before firing the first shot, having already stepped to the side of the car and possibly, worst case scenario, being in danger of having his foot run over

This is true, but now we're pretty deep in a vicious cycle where "dude fiction" is increasingly hard to come by because there's such a small likely return.

Just saw the Minnesota footage. That sure looks like murder.

They also tend to get really mad at any effort to make it harder for the strong to do things and easier for the weak to avoid suffering, which kind of gives the game away - it's a line trotted out by assholes who happen to favor the stronger side in a conflict.

The proliferation of hummingbird feeders has become a “major evolutionary force” for the Anna’s hummingbird species in the western US. “Over just a few generations, their beaks have dramatically changed in size and shape.” [science.org]

To me, there's an even more straightforward idiocy, in that those people get really upset when you ask whether the "strong" actually "can". The frontline in Ukraine has barely moved in years.

I’ve seen this quote over and over again since I woke up and people fixate on Trump stealing the oil money or how dictatorial this sounds, but nobody seems to ask: Did the Venezuelans actually agree to do this?

9/ Until you push back and demonstrate real consequences for crossing red lines, you will remain an object in Trump’s thinking, not a subject. Deterrence is the only language leaders with authoritarian mindset understand.

I would actually love people who actually know Chinese History to find the most analogous figure to Trump.

>Think you're super stealth inserting into a rural valley with the acoustic properties of an SEC stadium using a helicopter louder than a Metallica concert.

think the fact that maduro had cuban guards says a lot about the limited commitment of venezuelan institutions to his continued rule

And some say that even now, she wanders the house, searching, condemned to search, for the remote that was lost

I think it's important to recognize, if you haven't been inside a library recently, that their value proposition is radically changing in a way that is going to feel uncomfortable to people with fond memories of them from 20 years ago. They're basically community centers now.

I think this is, respectfully, a misreading of the international mood, and it's a common misreading among Americans. Canada and the EU perceive the status quo to be irretrievably fucked, because we don't trust the US to stay normal once it gets normal again.

To be absolutely real with y'all, my Twitter experience became markedly less toxic after the initial migration of users to Bluesky. Bluesky culture is only just beginning to grapple with the number of shitty human beings it's happy to enable if they have leftist politics.

I find it hard to square the preciousness about "why would someone ever stay on Twitter?" when everyone on this site knows that the community here intentionally chased off lots of people.

IR folks getting the Trump treatment of their subfield that Americanists have been struggling with since 2017

I've been on the receiving end of a few leftist mobs, and it's remarkable how offended their constituent members are that you would dare to defend yourself at all, much less reply to them using the same offensive language they have no compunctions about using on you.

I think the AI angle of this is obscurant. It doesn’t matter that grok is “an AI” whatever you take that to mean. Suppose X hired a team of guys to photoshop the clothes off of women and children whenever anyone asks. That’s functionally identical what happening here. It’s not complicated.

There is some truth to this, but my elder millennial friends and I flocked to it when it first came out, and while it's true we were never going to play it forever, we abandoned it *very* quickly by the standards of our gaming group. BF6 has fundamental problems.

I enjoyed Heated Rivalry but if I have one criticism, it's that I wish it showed more hockey. They do demonstrate this dynamic a little bit, but they spend a lot more time telling us that it exists.

"It's one thing to kidnap the president, but now you have insulted the oil" is so wild

It was the Nazis that eventually flipped my breaker. I hate communists, and I thought I hated communists and Nazis roughly the same, but it turns out my tolerance for encountering communists is yet to be reached and my tolerance for encountering Nazis is stumbling across a few dozen.

Collective responsibility for national sins, including historical sins that occurred before your ancestors even migrated to your nation, is a funny thing. The instinct is to disclaim responsibility, but I don't see how that's compatible with benefiting from the fruits of those national sins.

I also think the discussion would be more fruitful if they acknowledged that distinction, because that would get at the heart of it: there's a lot of things for which "that was bad, dumb, probably illegal, and if you want to stop it elect better leaders" is in fact (unfortunately) the right answer

If you're a 38 millennial like everyone else in BlueSky, the politics and economy of oil prices are completely inverted than what you grew up with. Unleashing Venezuelan oil into global markets would drop the price even further. This is now *bad* for US energy companies!

Glass Onion one of the most insightful movies of our era, to my infinite regret.

Just realized that Emperor Qin Shi Huang's "Terracotta Army" of clay soldiers he kept in a vault in like 200 BC make him the first Warhammer Guy. he got some disposable income and started painting minis. totally get it

This is, once again, a fantastic reminder of the need for a strong natsec bench for Dems and by strong bench I do not just mean people who are vocal about cutting the budget an insane percentage and go drinking with Quincy Institute fellows.

Can I just say the absolute most chaos outcome is that the Trump DOJ, which is comically bad at securing convictions, manages to completely bungle Maduro's trial.

I think at this point its entirely fair to just wait 48hrs and see which political entities appear to actually be exercising control on the ground, probably the actual govt led by the VP. Not many other ways to really tell what’s happening there w/o great on the ground journalism, which is unlikely.

I tend toward thinking that the act itself was not morally abhorrent, but that (i) the plan for the day after appears to be world-historically fucking stupid and (ii) it's bad that it was illegal under US law. It was an act of war that required Congressional sign-off.

I partially agree with this, and partially think the jury is out. As someone else pointed out, Ukrainians did plenty of damage with Russian-sourced aire defenses, so that part is correct. But I don't know if we have enough info to rate US capabilities.

Buck and Aikman incredulous the Seahawks went for it on 4th and goal, then five minutes later commending their good field position after a 49ers punt from their own goal line. Two men incapable of understanding those events are directly related.

Trump, as usual, can’t restrain himself from preemptively backstabbing his own helper before checking whether he’s actually secured a new contractor to defraud.

Finally we can do Sicario type operations in Latin America as shown in the movie Sicario: US Interventions In Latin America Are Bad

Watching him utterly crush roles in low-budget pulp fiction movies has been fascinating. His talent gets more undeniable the less talent he's surrounded by.

My growing Luddism with AI basically comes down to "I don't care what you promise it'll do to my productivity, I will not chug the slop". At a certain point you've gotta draw the line regarding what you're willing to outsource.

it's wild how many people on my timeline are already like fully into the new year rn. like. you know early adopters are basically lab rats right? we don't really know what 2k26 does to you in the long term

Just let any Eve online player bypass the hiring screening process and unleash them on our enemies.

BREAKING: Explosions felt across New York City as full socialism begins

By contrast, to reference the famous UCDavis medieval price list (medieval.ucdavis.edu/120D/Money.h...), in one armorer's shop, the best paid armorer got 466d per month, the next best 320, the rest 288. Those are your masters. Apprentices gotten ~156. A common laborer might have gotten ~40.

Accidentally messaged the subaltern periphery group chat "may your new year be full of imperial superprofits" and the metropole labor aristocrat group chat "may Babylon finally fall this year," so 2025 is starting off great 😒

Does how you treat a punching bag or a dildo affect how you treat humans? We need to draw clear lines around personhood when it comes to Fancy Autocomplete.

"Become the worst possible version of yourself and you will finally become a big shot" is the central promise of the Trump Era, and resisting that temptation is the central political struggle. I don't care what nominal politics someone holds if they're constantly falling to the call of The Beast

In retrospect this is probably one of the most cynical and brazen ratfucking attempts we've ever seen

bronze age raider cultures love to brag about how they did war crimes to a million people after a raid which seriously injured a teenager and stole four (4) goats