Two things can be true: we’re a competitive authoritarian state with all sorts of efforts to put a thumb on the scale of who has power AND we have sufficiently free and sufficiently fair elections that every month we see the party in power lose.

Epstein is the most garish and harrowing manifestation of this but oligarchy makes life miserable in a thousand other ways. A core point of democracy is that no one should have so much power that they can make themselves everybody's problem. We should have a political party that believes that

It's hard to face and it's bleak, but the Epstein revelations shine a sudden, stark light on what many powerful men will do when they think no-one can touch them.

Every stormtrooper ever.

Zelf Epstein trok de lijn aan Elon zijn cringe. Er zijn dus wel degelijk dingen die geld niet kan kopen.

2020: GOP hate masks even if it means more Americans die 2026: GOP love masks even if it means more Americans die

Hoch Kafka, ik noem het eerder fiscale transsubstantiatie. Laten we de dingen niet onnodig bemoeilijken.

Het probleem zat niet bij die éne muisklik. Misschien had hij zijn zelfreflectie niet moeten uitbesteden aan chatgpt.

"It's obviously regrettable when anyone is run down by Wargs, bound with chains of black iron and skinned alive with knives forged in the depths of Isengard, but let's remember that villagers have a responsibility not to impede the legitimate operations of Sauron's Legions."

"I support the underlying mission of plunging the world into darkness, ending the time of men and elves and ushering in the age of the orc, but some of the tactics employed by Gothmog's Variag and Easterling troops may have crossed the line. I call on Gondor and Rohan to help lower the temperature."

As public opinion turns, reports from within Mount Doom suggest Orc Lieutenant Gothmog is to be relieved of command and withdrawn from Gondor back to Minas Morgul where he is expected to soon retire. Sauron hopes this ends the matter and the Fellowship will now go home and stop blowing whistles.

Kijk mijn onzin verzin ik dus gewoon zelf en in tegenstelling tot Torfs laat ik het altijd vooraf weten als het sporen van feiten kan bevatten.

Autonomie en wendbaarheid zijn veel belangrijker. Kunnen requirements worden geschrapt als ze het project ondermijnen ? ook als die eerder in werkgroepen en met goedkeuring ministers zijn vastgelegd ?

I've been pretty hard on the Tories in the past but I can't deny they're doing a massive service to the country making Reform unelectable by filling it with Tories.

Years from now, it'll be difficult to explain the things people in media were wailing about before all this. Sophomores writing underconsidered op-eds about cultural appropriation. Protests against demagogues on campus. YA drama. "Mobs" on Twitter. These were the threats to free society.

God, tired of working in mysterious ways:

I was a sensitive kid. I loved cats. I had OCD, undiagnosed. When I was 9, a fraternity brother tortured a cat to death in my hometown. The details even now are beyond imagination. archive.is/xdmUL I was traumatized for years from reading the news story. The torturer? Now the head of the NRA.

Whether it's protesters filming ICE agents or ICE agents murdering protesters, there's plenty to criticize on both sides.

Didn't realise Casablanca was so funny. 'What right do I have to think?' 'You despise me don't you? - If I gave you any thought I probably would'

The best way of describing someone who’s all talk and no action that I’ve ever heard in the UK, by far, is “they’re all wardrobe and no Narnia.” * read on for fun ways of saying “all talk and no action” in other languages (a thread)

I'm going to become a right wing podcaster but only about soap. Bar soap is traditional values. Liquid soap is a disgrace. Squirting goo on yourself from a little bottle. Western civilization is at risk because of this

Een van de redenen dat we dit niet zagen aankomen is dat de Amerikaanse vloot enkel bewoog in het begin van de nacht, toen de hemellichamen nog niet aan de hemel waren. Dus wij maar denken dat die stil stonden.

“Look: Rome wasn’t burned in a day.”

In our conservative estimate, 41 percent of Grok’s images — or 1.8 million — were sexualized depictions of women. Separately, CCDH analyzed how many were sexualized images across genders and ages. Their findings: an estimated 3 million images, including more than 23,000 of children.

i think about this often

The point mostly stands but Dems are +8 right now (on average).

Europeans realising Trump can’t remember their country’s name long enough to invade it. #Davos

Uit onderzoek van VRT NWS blijkt dat de berichten van @torfsrik op X daadwerkelijk uit de koker komen van Rik Torfs. Die probeert zijn imago te redden: 'Ik dacht echt dat ik ze ergens heb gestolen van het internet, ze komen dus zeker niet letterlijk van mezelf.’ vremdemirror.com/2026/01/22/r...

This is definitely the speech of a man who needed to pass 3 separate cognitive tests in the same year. #Davos26

Vandaar de uitdrukking "tegen de windmolens vechten". De windmolens verliezen altijd.

Ik ga de Joker worden

The past is a foreign country selectively summarised by an outside author in a sponsored travel guide

Voor mij is een deel van de charme bij het lezen van een non-fictie boek juist het feit dat wat je leest het resultaat is van iemand die gedurende lange tijd zijn/haar gedachten probeert te ordenen en vervolgens checkt en dubbelcheckt.

In this video, I discuss Trump's obsession with owning Greenland, and what Europe can do about it.

Carney: "American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, a stable financial system... this bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition... recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as a weapon. Tariffs as leverage ... "

In a speech to the World Economic Forum, Mark Carney says middle powers such as Canada must accept that the rules-based international order is effectively dead, and great power rivalry with is here to stay. Key excerpt:

Tejo, what the fuck eigenlijk.

It is hard to overstate just how entrenched a certain view was until extremely recently, that Trump while "coarse“ and "doing bad things domestically“ would ultimately not change much in the relationship with Europe. That he would be rude, performative and "transactional“, but nothing more. Well.

evergreen

Op zich wel slim* om Connor te volgen in de trend om weg te stappen van acroniemen en ideologische tradities en gewoon te gokken op de kiezer die in het stemhokje komt, de partijen ziet staan en denkt "Ewel ja, Ik wil eens iets anders. Geef me dat maar."

Jarenlang gezwam van realisten over hoe landen altijd hun eigenbelang najagen en we daarom niet te veel in termen van idealen moeten denken. Meanwhile bij Trump: “Geef mij Groenland, ik heb het psychologisch nodig. Het was dat of een nobelprijs en ik heb geen nobelprijs.”

The Nobel Peace Prize becoming so prestigious that wars are fought over a head of state coveting it is some real monkey paw stuff for Alfred Nobel.

Trump's obsession with Greenland and erratic interventionism towards Venezuela are almost textbook case studies of a declining great power externalising its growing domestic instability into external imperial quagmires

Dus een voormalig partijvoorzitter insinueert dat een Vlaams minister cocaïne gebruikt en het debat vervolgens over beleefdheid. Ok dan.