Plaidula

My Insta has a lot of Malfoid on it now (partially my fault for scrolling through a few comics), and I can tell the right has already lost this one because there are basically no comics I've seen where the pureblood supremacists are the good guys who convert Harry to their side, but plenty contrary.

I tried to explain the concept of Malfoid as a right-wing cultural movement to some queer, non-terminally-online folks and they got to laugh very hard at the entire idea.

I mean, are US defense stocks tumbling because the Democrats, or are they tumbling because we just gave every non-US buyer of US military tech not just a reason but a straight up *imperative* to diversify and invest in their own military production?

These are reasonable and they absolutely should be thought through carefully, but all such negatives have to be weighed against assessment of how bad the current Court is. It’s possible to concede essentially all the downsides and still conclude it’s the lesser evil because the status quo is worse.

Contrarian take, but for as much as I think Tillis is a coward trying too little too late and the GOP should have nothing but suffering until we beat them so far into the dirt we don't need to bury the party when it dies, I think this is good and I hope he succeeds.

Of course, this pitch sounds very different when the median voter is conveniently imagining that, since you said 5 contradictory things you might do, you'll do the things they like and not the stuff they don't like, as opposed to when you're the actual president and you keep doing things they HATE.

a big reason (though not the only one) that so many elite institutions capitulated to Trump immediately in early 2025 is they had learned through long experience that Dems are too chickenshit to punish them for basically any reason. but things can change!

Though, cards on the table, in my ideal world we would have shifted those interceptor stocks and then told Ukraine to absolutely keep blowing the crap out of Russian oil infrastructure until every last Russian soldier was either off Ukrainian soil or buried in it.

Let me try this: Maybe Trump campaigning, stealing from taxpayers to put out ads, and trying to bribe voters; Vance begging people to give them more of a chance; and Republicans spending big in TX, KS, SC, etc. is because they *don’t* have a good plan to overturn electoral loss, not because they do.

the reason “AI will create so much abundance we will have a utopian society” rhetoric falls so flat is that the people building it will never, ever share their bounty unless it is taken from them and we all know it

You could replace Biden with anyone you can think of and they aren’t going to be able to fundamentally restructure the judiciary with the narrowest legislative majority in American history. Biden would have preferred larger majorities! He’s a New Deal guy!

The blame for Trump 2 lies with voters! That’s a bummer! But you gotta accept that!

Increasingly convinced that like 80% of issues map onto one axis: Mom vs Drunk Uncle. HR Ladies? Moms. Founders? Drunk Uncles. Wine Aunts are Moms, despite the alcohol, while Alpha Male Abstainers are Drunk Uncles despite pretending to believe in moderation/self control.

Reviving this classic from 2023.

Wanted 3 things tonight: 1. Judkins gets me a bunch of fantasy points 2. Rodgers gets sacked a lot and has a bad time 3. Watson gets sacked a lot and has a bad time 2/3 ain't bad

I probably listen to significantly more AI music than the average person, but that's because a lot of AI music is the perfect thing to put on while digging through code and spreadsheets specifically because it's reached a middle point where the mechanics are solid but the emotional valence is low.

I'm sorry no, voters aren't getting a pass on this one.

In practice though, it really seems like we're moving towards, "AI is a productivity tool that enhances the employee you have, but often doesn't really let you replace them, so much as get more out of them, in some fields. In others, it's mostly useless so far."

“The base” means core voters, not those furthest from center who denounce the party and say don’t vote. Every sign says the Democratic base is very energized: party registration, likely voter screens, primary and special election turnout, generic ballot, which states are competitive, you name it.

The American Democratic Party is overwhelmingly pro-trans.

Gotta admit that I don't really think it's coincidental that suddenly all the knives are out for Talarico the moment polling has rather decisively turned in his favor.

Ossoff: "The draft-dodging commander in chief builds a monument to himself while plunging us deeper into a war he doesn't know how to end or win"

I'm not even stating a side on the latest Discourse - I'm simply saying: the goal of this shit published from the Beltway punditocracy, a group we KNOW loves Republicans & wants them to win, is to get YOU, personally, to despair & see enemies everywhere, to convince you the real war is against Dems

This is the most irksome part of watching people drag the founding fathers for "not anticipating this." You can anticipate all you want, but if the volk want ruination to cure their affluenza, there is no possible system to prevent them from getting it, including "authoritarianism, but for good"

I mean, Trump is successfully driving enormous numbers of farmers to bankruptcy and the Democratic coalition is probably only getting less reliant on farming communities in both the primaries and general elections moving forward. The pro-farming, pro-rural consensus may be coming to an end.

It’s been extremely funny to watch the “always following, always angry about politics” website predictably crash out over this. You guys do realize Jeffries has run circles around Johnson, right? He’s not the most inspiring pol but he is actually quite good at the job. Sorry.

I want to expand on this in a short thread. Fascism sucks. It is also not going away: it is an effectively permanent part of modern representative politics because it is an effectively permanent part of human nature. We have to be prepared to push back against it, basically forever.

We lived like that - brutal, slavery-and-genocide beggar-thy-neighbor competition for resources in which suspicion and violence towards outsiders was a key survival skill - for many tens of thousands of years before we even developed farming. We created culture for it. We *evolved* for it.