Grizwald

A baffling take by MattY in a world that's never been more interconnected in terms of both economies and culture. Enemies of liberal democracy across the globe are delighted to find ways to mutually support each other.

American conservatives are constantly bemoaning the decline of aesthetic standards and calling for a return to tailored suits and classical Roman architecture, but are now forced to defend the Cheesecake Factory. A constant tension between the Brooks Brothers patrician and the Kid Rock populist.

intelligence is knowing that if i ever looked up anything about Magyar, Lula, or any of the other election winners i would probably not be great fans of their politics wisdom is knowing it doesn't matter because defeating the global chud coalition is all that matters for the foreseeable future

Can someone explain this one to me? I don't understand the logic.

if voting didn't matter they wouldn't be working so hard to stop you

The obvious follow-up question to this sentiment is "then why have gendered sports leagues at all?" A few progressives respond that we should indeed abolish gendered sports leagues. Most, who damn well know they're full of shit on this issue, just get angry and go off on a tangent.

Geez, I wonder if anything relevant to this topic starts happening around age 12.

I’m guessing the results from the first batch of GPUs in space are bad because instead of hearing about how wonderful orbital data centers are Elon has pivoted hard towards “only I can break regulations fast enough to build regular earth based data centers, unlike those losers at Coreweave”

Because there are 10s of thousands of Democratic electeds in the United States, and you have positioned yourself directly into a media environment that is designed to find every statement a Democrat makes that is even vaguely transphobic as soon as it happens.

Lula:

I just googled "Cheesecake Factory" and the interiors are much nicer than the name suggests they'd be.

As I've said before, it's only once I became a professor that I realized the entmoot, a meeting that goes on for three days and three nights, was a professor's joke about faculty meetings.

no matter how sure you are that these guys have broken a whole bunch of laws, you aren't nearly as certain as they are

What a shitheel. Easy to have an anti-war stance when others are shouldering the burden of national defense on your behalf.

The correct answer to the trolley problem is that there is a meaningful distinction between redirecting an environmental hazard to minimize harm and violating the bodily autonomy of others to force them into the path of an environmental hazard. Means matter, not just ends.

I'm pretty sure you can just nationalize SpaceX on national security grounds at a conservative price per share that reflects present value, not potential future value, and he's turbofucked.

I think very specifically it cannot be the case that the president can pardon people *in advance* for crimes of which they have not yet been convicted. That's not a pardon power, that's lawlessness.

lmfao

found out that my mother in law decided she was aggressively pro trans rights literally by going, I don't know anything about this but everyone who is against trans rights is also against free school lunch, the issue I know and care a lot about, so this must be the correct way to feel about this

Obama ran on a platform of opposing gay marriage because of its unpopularity. Just because he favored soaring rhetoric and flashy posters with "HOPE" on them in big letters doesn't mean he wasn't engaged in the same triangulation as Clinton.

Any queer culture writers who have written about this? I feel like there’s a very real difference between Gen Z and millennial queer culture and “I didn’t spend my formative years closeted” seems like one of the clear dividing lines.

IMHO, the problem with Mass Effect's politics, as is so often the case with fantasy and sci-fi games is that it sort of conflates diplomatic relations with racial politics in a muddled way which garbles its message.

ME2 is such a quantum leap forward in terms of graphics and gameplay that it really disguises how much worse it is at worldbuilding and narrative coherence

Not the top Steam review of Dressmaker making me cry this morning!

making a modern update to Rashomon by inviting 7 different transcription bots into an important zoom call.

The US government is now asking Elon Musk to restore the access they say was never removed, Elon says was shut down by the US government, and both briefly tried to pretend was down due to a technical glitch, in between darkly hinting Ukrainians deserve to die for being stubborn or ungrateful.

TBQH I am increasingly of the belief that most democracies - certainly the US and Canada - should simply elect a king who wields power over everything but election-related matters, because the median voter engages with government as if they expect a king to get everything done.

Bioware's heart may have stopped beating in 2026, but Bioware's brain death was back in like 2012 or so. That's when grandpa's dementia meant he wasn't really there anymore, even if his body kept going. I completed my mourning of Bioware's passing years ago.

What feels different about this American election cycle compared to previous ones is how many strong candidates the Dems seem to have and how young and energetic those candidates are.

We’ve talked enough about our own risk tolerance. It’s time to talk about Russia’s risk tolerance.

Crazy this is not obvious to Wall Street: every democracy saw what Musk did to Ukraine last week and confirmed security need for Starlink alternative. Those alternatives will not just serve defense needs, but also be viable commercial alternatives, crushing any hope of SpaceX's monopoly projections.

The problem with powerscalers is that they're unimaginative. They talk about "can goku beat superman" and not "could lord vetinari fix gotham"