"How badly a cartoon character gets treated isn't the problem, the problem is that people might be jacking off to impure thoughts" literally who gives a shit you insufferable god-fearing fucking wimp go back to the kids' table

oh Dana’s MAD mad 👏

incredible how everyone around Charlie Kirk is just feasting on his carcass, not a single one of them letting any of it go to waste. Dude was an awful person and surrounded himself with awful people and, surprisingly, none of them were actually loyal to him

Another way to build a sense of community and shared purpose with others without completely disrupting the lives young people are already living would be to expand and strengthen labor unions.

Ross's "conservatives must be above informal judgment, or else" goes hand in hand with Trump's "conservatives must be above the law, or else". If society will not accommodate them in all their unpleasantness, will not "say thank you", they would choose a state of nature & the war of all against all.

GOING FROM BINARY TRANS TO NON-BINARY IS NOT DETRANSITIONING

I must say again it's good that he's taken this solemn memorial service to find common ground and points of mutual agreement with the left. Most relatable thing he's ever said

You meet the love of your life but then she leaves you one day for her weird ex who is always writing about elves

Trump's people focused their efforts not on reaching out empathetically to Biden voters. They tried to make Biden voters feel like fools and chumps by humiliating and insulting Biden and it worked.

Young people are already the most tolerant folks in the country. No one ever proposes making people 50+ do national service or some such because no one believes you can make them do anything, while it's generally accepted that young people exist to be commanded and pay for everyone else's bullshit.

I don’t think anyone left of Pinochet said anything as savage about Kirk as referring to his funeral as “a time of whatever.”

Did Trump win in November because he showed grace and empathy to people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020? Politics is not an Afterschool Special. You put out a strong message about what's wrong, propose a compelling policy agenda, hope the economy cooperates and that's it. None of this mush.

i think"getting them to stay home" is an easier and more feasible objective than "getting them to change their minds"

Thinking about the part of Le Morte d'Arthur where Sir Gareth rescues Lyonesse from the Red Knight and then they get so horny he immediately tries to sneak into her bedroom so her sister Lynette has to enchant a suit of armor to fight him off for a week until the priest arrives to marry them.

Man alive. I have studied Right Wing authoritarianism for years and have watched some truly fucked up shit and today’s memorial service is maybe the most concentrated example of how messed up and disturbing that sector truly is.

many ppl highlighting flaws in this article. but having fought in the "80% desistance" wars of the mid-2010s, I remember asking anti-trans activists if they'd be ok if 80% of youth were helped by gender-affirming care (flipping their argument). & they *never* answered. b/c they want *zero* trans ppl

i love giving entities that are more gullible than my grandma access to both my full home infrastructure and unfiltered external communication methods

I meant this deeply: My work now is all dissent work. I write for a future I likely will not see.

“I will end my career writing dissent, that is my future. And you understand that you’re writing for a future society. That dissents are not about today. Dissents are writing for a future society that will take that dissent, that will be ready for that dissent, & enact it” @nhannahjones.bsky.social

Everyone could use a reminder that the idea behind our system of government is that we cede some of our power to it in exchange for it working on our behalf. When it stops doing that it becomes illegitimate and must be changed. The idea that the people can "betray" a government organ is perverse

elite centrist/lib transphobia is one of those classic contrarian things where they’ve built up a huge pile of facially convincing “evidence” that collapses immediately if you put it under serious scrutiny

we have gone from a world in which we were told not to cite wikipedia because it was unreliable to a world where wikipedia might be the only reliable source left on the internet and we all owe a lot to the pedantic nerds who got us there

big deal, there were at least 100 of these guys at any given anime convention from 2001-2005

other ppl have spoken to the numbers fudging but also principally: 1) why is 'stability of gender identity' a metric at all? it does not follow that any shift in gender ID = negative outcome for med. transition 2) the irreversibility of transition, esp. the kind youth can get, is overstated

This is exactly backwards. From the beginning, Kirk was the beneficiary of a large and highly organized network of dark money donors who were looking for a spokesman. No way he would have done what he did without patrons like Montgomery and Uihlein. Kirk didn't make money - money made Kirk.

The dragon in question

They can't drag this Kirk stuff out that much longer and then one way or another something's gotta give. I really think we're reaching a breaking point

ah. bluesky.

Low key the best part of Skyrim is how the rebels are like WE FIGHT FOR THE OLD WAYS TO PRESERVE OUR WAY OF LIFE FROM GAY ELF SHIT LIKE MAGIC AND BOOKS and if you pay literally any attention to the game at all, you notice reactionary Nord culture is a post-Oblivion invention.

there are unpleasant people on both here and X who will pop into your mentions but on here they're mainly just people doing that 2018-2020 left twitter thing where they do a weird impression of a high school bully and on there it's republican congressional candidates and/or literal nazis

Imagining being the military governor of Alabama and the first day on the job you catch Osama bin Laden and his friends. You're about to execute them but then Godzilla attacks and they get away. Also, you almost executed bin Laden's innocent pizza guy by accident and the pizza guy is actually Jesus.

"Well, well, well, look who's back. Not so easy to find salt of the earth country folk who don't suck shit, is it?"

Jesus Christ how are people like this semi-functional adults

Buried details: the 18% of kids whose identities shifted over the course of the study were overwhelmingly between binary trans and non-binary or vice versa. The number who shifted between binary cis and trans was very low indeed - out of a subset of 254, precisely *one* kid shifted in this way.

we have to remember that fast food chains are a battleground for politics because the average community center in small conservative cities are fast food restaurants and that’s all they can base their personalities on

Disney adults canceling subscriptions, vacations, etc really are making the Harry Potter adults that threw a fit over a $60 video game look like huge bitches

And it does kind of highlight that the HARRY POTTER adults could have dumped Rowling all along, definitely did know (given that the Disney adults already know, and that's a much larger group), and are simply choosing not to

and like, sure, a *decent* fraction of people who see such a screenshot will click through to the quote and show the appropriate appreciation to the actual comments, but i don't think *i* deserve any reward for having seen this

I would actually like to seriously propose that in order to hold public office, you must have completed either: A) four years at a public high school or B) four years in a customer-facing service industry/labor job

it's all about this fucking angle

okay AI controversy aside, just talking as a nerd for a second: this is such a cool paper

The goal of democratic politicians should be to make Trump have the approval rating as the clap

They abandoned the whole free speech thing as soon as people started saying things that genuinely offended them. It wasn’t that they were so tolerant that they accepted nazi talk as a necessary evil to protect speech writ large, they just liked saying and hearing slurs bsky.app/profile/jame...

this is one of those things where it's not just kind of a shitty thing to do but also stupid, counterproductive, bad coalition management, and bad strategically both for the party and for his own career

These guys live in a nightmare of their own making. Nobody serious argues that (politely) turning down a trans person is some kind of unforgivable sin. They're letting a bad Tumblr stereotype in their heads terrorize them.

She should go for a Senate seat and then take a swing at the presidency after consolidating her power there for a few terms imho.

Embrace enlightened centrism and realize Schumer Bad and Trump Bad are both subspecies of Specific Type of Guy From New York Bad and strategically align your political support accordingly. Critical support to Comrade Mamdani against STGFNYism and long live the Great Khan of the Plains.

Conservative men are apparently pretending to be liberal and then "coming out" to their progressive girlfriends after dating for months