you know, yes the times hates trans people but it is also pretty insane that they’d adopt this tone if a guy in a trump van shot up their building

i dont think the CCP leadership 'think in centuries' but i do think theyre still vaguely aware that its possible to lose, be overthrown or see china's position diminished. our leadership is like a bunch of flightless birds on a desert island. the idea that they could lose just doesnt occur to thme.

Greenland has 56,000 people. Its health services are publicly funded by the Danish government. It doesn't need a 1000-bed hospital ship that's in drydock, anyway. Mobile, Alabama, where Mercy and Comfort are dry-docked, has 187,000 people & turned down Medicaid expansion under the ACA. It might.

at the end of the day it’s easily understood as geopolitical, but the rehabilitation of KMT history from a pro-CCP POV is just bonkers to me. Chiang backstabbed and then slaughtered like 90% of early CCP membership along with a ton of other broadly left leaning groups in the 1927 White Terror

Chiang has to be one of the WOAT military/political leaders

“I am just stunned at how little anyone we've spoken to lately – whether they be senior administration officials, Trump advisers, or anyone else close to the decision-making process – can give me a straight answer about what the mission would be here, beyond the Mad King Donald just doing his thing…

Being able to ask the LLM and bounce things off of it is probably a genuine improvement over google searching stuff and finding reddit threads with "wow this solved my problem" under "this comment was deleted by a Reddit account anonymizer"

this take is common but the truth is weirder no consumer product in history ever caught new users as fast as ChatGPT. talking 100m users in *three months*. its adoption was nuts simultaneously you got loads of poor implementations of LLM features in other products in vain hope of similar growth

in summary

They don't want rice, they want to endlessly critique rice

Vote Green: The Spice Must Flow

kind of amazing that everything trump does can be understood through the lens of narcissism and it's related needs (e.g., self aggrandizement, revenge, domination, grievance validation). i don't think any character has been so one-dimensional, not even wile e coyote or scrooge mcduck

1/2 Tag urself I'm Big Word

i'm not one but i did go through all the pseudo-Hebrew names in the Book of Mormon a while back and tried to translate them: Lehi = לחי = jawbone Nephi = נפי = we will my mouth Enos = ענוס = violently forced Jarom = ירום (technically a name, so Smithy gets a pass on this one)

People think Buddhism is the secret Not A Religion religion which is like Reddit atheism except with kung fu and you get to be a Jedi and smoke weed. I do not think that’s how it actually works.

genuinely astonishing how many people have fallen for the Bhutanese 'happiness index' over the years. Yes, this isolated absolute monarchy that doesn't allow visitors unless strictly controlled and carried out an ethnic cleansing campaign is definitely somewhere that sincerely values happiness!

if you're wondering about the ethnic cleansing part, guess what doesn't appear in all the 'happy Bhutan' stories en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_...

Even nominally left wing papers have no interest in telling human interest stories about trans people. No one cares. And we're months in.

Nearly a year into many trans people in the UK being forced to use disabled toilets or asked to work from home pending legal advice and stuff and I haven't seen a single "Izzy's boss told her she has to use a disabled toilet, here's how she feels about it" piece in the papers.

re: civil war posters:

I WILL DO IT I WILL GET MYSELF CANCELLED TO ADVANCE THE DISCOURSE

if we do have armed civilians engaged in conflict in the US it will end up basically like the troubles but considerably worse (and, frankly, I don't think anyone making the arguments like harper is above have reckoned with a conflict marked by neighbor-a-neighbor random violence)

Ayn Rand would be ashamed of someone tearing down people’s ability to use the work of genius scientists and inventors

The US Attorney that covers the area in Maine where John Roberts has a vacation home

I believe papers about extinct charismatic vertebrates should be held to the same publishing standards and norms as other taxonomic groups. It's objectively bizarre that papers describing a single species gets published in Science/Nature as if that's considered of broad paleobiological significance

unfortunately Rumsfeld's "known unknowns" bit is actually...a really insightful and reasonable way to look at planning for dangerous situations. I think about it all the time in my work. Pity he didn't actually understand what he was saying.

he just got one toy he likes playing with a lot (tariffs) taken away from him. he has a lot of other toys and they're prepped for use

Thinking about the Millennium Challenge 2002 for no reason in particular

and spare me the "trump's gonna TACO, he's bluffing, 2 weeks" crap. at this point we've got so many more assets in the region that such shit looks like the "putin won't attack ukraine" bullshit. to use a vulgar metaphor: you don't put on a condom unless you're going to fuck.

jaw is on the floor, this is going to go catastrophically bad www.reuters.com/world/middle...?

I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I really want the record to show -- since certain people made such a production of believing otherwise -- that a stupid, pointless, destructive war was one of the most obvious risks of electing Trump. His kind of guy always pulls this shit to feel big

I really, really hope he loses interest at the last second, but it seems like we're finally doing it. God help everyone

the thing about M-L is that people raised in it from birth and groomed to implement it as a ruling ideology, in charge of the second most powerful country ever to have existed, abandoned it without objection and without complaint, en masse, without being conquered

I bet they don't mean this in the way we'd all like to think

My professor needs to give me 7 days notice before he comes by my desk and asks if I have any new results

You’re not required to give them 7 days notice. That’s literally not the law.

A Cambodian man -- old enough to have survived Pol Pot genocide but too young to die -- is the 7th person to die in ICE custody this year. A Cuban man died of asphyxia in Jan, with witnesses saying guards killed him. A Palestinian woman was shackled after a seizure. www.reuters.com/world/us/cam...

The three journalists who helped ruin Ava Cordero's life when she tried to stop Epstein in 2006 *currently* work at NBC News, New York Magazine, and News Corp Australia. The one at NBC News is covering... Epstein.

Imagining a president in a God's Not Dead movie who every time he goes on TV says something like "I'm going to hell, I'm attracted to men and I want to raise your taxes"

Maybe somebody at CNN can explain the difference here because I don’t qwhite understand it 🤔

At least when Charles I tried to illegally tax people consent he was doing it to avoid a legislature controlled by the *opposition*

if trump wants to raise tariffs, why doesn't he just go through the republican-controlled congress?

No one moves third of their war gear to threaten a war without the intention of war. It will happen any day now. It’s of course not a legal war or a needed war, but that has never stopped empire, historically.

Have any of you been to Threads? It’s like Bluesky but even more embarrassing. The best way I can describe it is: A fictional Twitter made for Grand Theft Auto.

Trump is extremely evil but also unintentionally the funniest man to ever be the president

I mean

the reason why we're getting such bitch ass responses from people who have the capacity to do something about the fact that the president is a madman is that everyone is afraid of his followers.

“I tried to help my neighbors. I was blissfully ignorant of the private laughter enjoyed by the eminent and comfortable among us when I set out to do something that I was stupid enough to think was not only right but expected of me.” www.liberalcurrents.com/the-last-idi...