Next edition of On War is gonna look like this

I go on any video app and see people younger than me making fun of AI and getting thousands and thousands of likes, and then go on Bluesky and see people angrily insisting that literally everyone uses AI for everything and not using it is a Bluesky weirdo thing.

One of my favorite things about the Trump Era is that any invocation of civic virtue or decency, no matter how anodyne, is implicitly understood by his supporters as an attack on him and his movement.

HARD BOILED (1992): I gave this 3.5 stars on Letterboxd because quite frankly, I didn't know what else to put. Is this movie good? Not exactly. Is this movie utterly proposterous in every way? Yes. And thus worth seeing? Oh God yes. It's basically McGarnagle meets Die Hard set in 90s Hong Kong...

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

Purple Monkey Dishwasher

I am utterly unsympathetic to “you were born to be a barbarian, not type things in an office” bullshit. so many people in history would have dropped everything to have email jobs and only do what they were actually doing in immersive simulations.

An important thing to understand about postwar culture is how many people watching beauty pageants - 23 million for Miss World there.

A right-wing extremist shot Jo Cox MP in the street and other MPs used the murder of their colleague to push for outlawing being insulted on the internet by anonymous accounts, none of these people are serious and they all live in a magical fantasy world of packing peanuts and soft corners

It's the first thing, the very very first thing they did when coming into the building. Usually, this stuff gets analysed as "what this absolute primary priority of the new admin tells us about ...", but in this case, no one wants to say it out loud, I guess

I simply do not believe that voters are incapable of understanding “1/6th of the worlds oil supply is blocked, we must use less of it” and if you do genuinely do believe that I don’t know what’s the point of engaging in politics

Specifically with medicine one thing you see all the time is people wilfully or not wilfully confusing 'being attractive' with 'being healthy'. Certainly correlated, but not the same thing.

Drunk Guys who drunk text their ex at 4am show less desperation than many very online Americans do when they want to explain why Europe is bad.

People who think current year pension discourse is deranged aren't really prepared for ten years time when people born in the 1970s whose entire working careers were post-deindustralisation and so often never had a good career pension start to retire.

Fundamentally I don't think the Artemis II launch matters.

I really can’t believe that a bunch of researchers were surprised to find dudes in the “keep women barefoot and pregnant” movement are hostile to women

No they don't - what the fuck are you talking about?

All my adult life we’ve been treated to an unceasing chorus that ‘the markets’ are a source of price information in the aggregate, which provides an objective signal based on ground realities, but what we can all see w/r/t this war is ‘the markets’ are in fact dumb as shit mug punters

Yeah, the argument that someone should be banned from competing in Olympic sports because they are deemed to be some kind of genetic freak raises all kinds of questions.

This has been fairly obvious through their obvious disdain for Ukrainians standing up for themselves.

”el boom”, which is spanish for ”the boom”, refers to the boom in interest in latin-american literature in the late 60s and early 70s

Rowling's view is apparently that you can be born a woman, raised as a woman, identified as a woman, socialized as a woman, legally classified as a woman, but you're "really" a man if your hormonal balances are irregular, WHICH HAS SOME FUCKING IMPLICATIONS, DOESN'T IT??

The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of posting through it.

btw, something genuinely wild about both the Ukraine and Iran wars is just how thoroughly incapable either authoritarian state is at stopping infiltration and sabotage operations

What's especially interesting about this is that it didn't stop the likes of Gogarty achieving high respectability - he was a doctor and a senator - amid one of the strictest censorship and puritanical regimes in modern Europe.

As a random aside to things, it's worth remembering that a UK government written during the First World War stated that they were estimated about 10% of the urban population had Syphilis.

Centuries, but yes.

La la Land is the greatest romantic film ever made because it captures the innate male desire to have a relationship built on ruthlessly antagonizing a girl and then forcing her to spend the entire first date listening to you explain your favorite music to her.

It is quite telling that since the horrific story of Cesar Chavez re: sexual abuse broke earlier this week and calls to change the names of schools and other public spaces named in his honor, not one conservative voice has stepped forward to object that this would be tantamount to erasing history.

THE KILLER (1989): The one thing can say about this movie without a shadow of a doubt is that the title is not false advertising.

KING LEAR (1987) - Well, this extremely Jean Luc Godard film was an extremely Jean Luc Godard film. Although of all the films of his I've seen this reminds me the most of Peter Greenaway when he's abstruse, which is not praise. There's no point in explaining what happens in this movie...

None of the French 75 got blown up by their own bombs, they stopped after killing a single civilian, no one in the group was clearly psychotic. It does for new left revolutionary groups what law and order is for cops

Basically this always happens because right-wingers love to scream about how woke universities are overspending on 'mickey mouse' courses and promise to cut them to shreds... then get into office, find those mickey mouse courses cost peanuts and need some other way to take back the money...

Most of the things Paul Ehrlich is being blamed for would have happened if he had never existed - you think 60s Indian brahmin fabians needed an American professor to think that the country's massive population growth was a profound disaster? Get real.

This but the good screen has the same image displayed as the bad screen

A contrarian - to some people I guess - and certainly unpopular take is that the films that get nominated for academy awards are in general significantly superior to those that were nominated in the 90s and the 00s - a real middlebrow period if ever there was one.

If this is anything like the book it's going to produce the most insane discourse for a blockbuster of all time.

Great shout this. 'Everything Everywhere' is IMV an understudied movie in that few people have noticed that it is what *actual* Oscar bait now looks like, because there are so few middlebrow genre movies anymore.

Ftr: 1. The Secret Agent/Marty Supreme (tie) 3. Sentimental Value 4. One Battle After Another 5. Sinners 6. Hamnet 7. Bugonia N/A: Frankenstein, F1, Train Dreams (didn't see)

Not saying anything revolutionary here but it's really worth repeating how 'standard republican president' the whole Trump terms have been in the end. Delivered on abortion, delivered on taxes, total deregulation of the winning sector, insulting European partners, and stupid war in the Middle East

A lot of the elite became very online for the first time in the pandemic and it’s hit them like smallpox in the Americas

easy to forget in all of this but we're still on track for some kind of cuban collapse soon

HAIL MARY (1985): This is my first post-Weekend Godard and well... I can't say I didn't know what I was getting for. I feel like a lot of Godard there's a lot of effort involved for not much payoff. Otoh, Godard's ability to make very good scenes and a striking mise-en-scene was very present...

Very funny to hear the RTE commentary team strongly supporting England.

Time makes mugs of us all

Eating beans is inherently podcaster.

I'm not going to pay to read the entirety of this article - Matty has too much money already - so I may be acting unfairly here but I do think it should be mandatory when mentioning the triple lock to list how much exactly the state pension is actually worth.

there's this weird tendency to see Palestine as a load-bearing part of global systems of power or capital, rather than a marginalized population brutally oppressed by a fairly small state. A mirror image of the "Israel is the defender of the West' stuff.