Aeillien

I see we're doing this again. Anyways, Zionism is Jewish ethno-nationalism, which doesn't make it any more inherently evil than Serbian or Italian or Greek or Turkish or Mexican nationalism, but is also no reason to it treat it as any more exculpatory for the crimes of the Israeli state.

Are we sure that Trump is not secretly the stupidest environmentalist?

Another fantasy that leaders engage in is the fantasy that their opponents lack agency: we can just do stuff to them and they will not respond. That one *always* goes badly.

The people who talk about expanding the tent are never, ever actually expanding the tent. They want to pick up the tent and move it rightwards. If the tent were getting bigger, letting in new people would not require pushing other people out, which the metaphorical expansion somehow always does.

Even if we grant that: those who insist we should remain Over There refuse to engage with the fact that we will not be heard. The app has been designed, on purpose, to silence some voices and raise others. It is not even close to a neutral space. You are asking people to go scream in a void.

Unfortunately, in US journalism it is considered neutral to spread a lie, but it is considered "biased" to call out a lie. So, there is a structural asymmetry that rewards colorful lies with virality.

People’s ideas about the world are formed mostly from their social environment. Their social environment includes their parasocial environment: media and social media. The parasocial share of our social environment has been growing for many decades.

A chapter in Hegseth’s book is literally titled “More Lethality, Less Lawyers.” It’s almost as if there were signs!

look, I’ve been operating on the assumption that we cannot reach Bush 2 numbers because the media environment makes the floor much higher than it was back then (and Fox won’t throw him overboard the same way) but, uh, we aren’t through year one and…

Many of us weren't well supervised in the 80s. Our parents gave us house keys, dropped us at school, and hoped for the best.

I think more than anything else AI feels like a miracle to people with questionable literacy because it can read and write for you, and a lot of us who are highly literate underestimate how many of our society's leaders, esp in business, struggle with literacy.

Good morning to Brazilian reporter Manuela Borges, who’s been waiting eleven years for this petty moment. ❤️ 🇧🇷

oh this is absolutely what i think. i think they feed him fake polls and outright AI slop

Kids don't always want to be on screens, they just need spaces and places to live, grow and play independently.

I love pretty much all pie and don't understand why we have to make all these bad bitches fight each other. My personal fav is strawberry rhubarb, but if you don't like a certain kind of pie, I think it's likely you have only had poor examples of that pie.

Sometimes I think it’s going to be the librarians who will save us all.

I think the fact that we're basically looking at Bush 08 bubbling up before year one is even wrapped is what makes this period fundamentally different to the cycle we've seen with Bush and Trump I

The thing about laws is that they are nothing more & nothing less than agreements we decide to abide by. As Locke observed people in general will stick by laws even under fairly bad circumstances. But past a certain point, if the law is perceived as being broken beyond repair, we can just change it.

The problem with this article is they asked too many lawyers and not enough historians. As a historian, I'd say the legality of Trump's immunity and pardons depends on how he leaves office. At 40 over 55 approval? He's immune. At 25 over 65? He's probably not immune & self-pardons aren't legal.

So we are currently at multiple threatened military operations, attorneys being rejected for improper appointments, suburbanites chasing the armed agents of the state cursing their names, a two vote margin in the house, and consumer sentiment worse than 2008/2009. It’s been less than a year.

One of my favorite things is getting to tell friends who are new to NYC that the subway "stand clear of the closing doors please" voice is a trans woman named Bernie Wagenblast and she's amazing.

I am being personally attacked.

If you use GMail, AI (Gemini) was turned on yesterday by default and now scans all of your content for machine learning. To turn off, go to Settings>General and scroll down. Uncheck the box for "Smart features." There's other "Smart" add-ons as well, but that's the one that reads your content.

very important for the government of the USA to explain the difference between pedophilia and ephebophilia while visa and Mastercard must defend Western morality by blocking anyone from buying games with illustrated school uniforms in them

I mean, Trump's policies have taken an economy that was the envy of the world & had record job numbers at low inflation and in less than a year we're now at "limping along, with lots of warning signs" Supposing that it stays stable at the current "limping along" is the *less* sensible position, imo.

this thread is unbelievable

Bellingcat’s contact email has always been a magnet for people with fairly unusual views; paranoid delusions, sprawling conspiracies, the works. But recently, the pattern has shifted, we’re seeing more and more emails clearly written with ChatGPT.

one thing i think is true is that republicans assumed that democrats would not respond in kind and that the forceful pushback spooked them (a lesson to learn here, perhaps)

I've had a few 'what do you do' convs recently, and everyone on hearing I'm an author comes out with "so how do you come up with ideas?", just like every book or movie about a writer has them staring numbly into space because they don't have an idea for the next book. And look, that is Not It.

If the president can just raise taxes and spend money without Congressional approval, the constitution is null and void.

it’s amazing how these idiot men can’t seem to figure out that if a woman 20+ years younger than you wants to fuck you, there is almost certainly something *extremely* weird about her

Would love to see someone from the moderate, Majority Dem faction really address and wrestle with the political effects of what Labour has been up to.

You know how in the old road runner cartoons the Coyote would run over a cliff, keep running, then look down, everything would pause for a second, then he would fall? We are at roughly pause for a second o clock right now.

If I had to guess, I would estimate we are roughly... here:

i think that a lot of people (of all ideological varieties) conflate "face genuine economic pressures personally", "face structural trends that favor certain forms of conservatism", and "have personal issues that funnel them into extreme politics" into a single issue and that's unhelpful

In 2010, Keith Olbermann smeared the Assange rape accusers, went on a week-long tear of blocking everyone and quitting Twitter when criticized, then accused me of "glorifying smoking" because I had a cigarette in my PFP, but it would have made more sense if I'd known he was living with a teenager.

A critic (readers generally, but I'm thinking here of people who set out to analyze or otherwise discuss a work) can only see through the lens of their own context. That lens makes everything look like it fits (or doesn't) whatever pattern the critic is most familiar with.

I know way, way too much about Olivia Nuzzi's sex life and I have learned all of it against my will.