…ok…of all the dumb shit to have set you off among all the dumb & tragic shit that’s going on

As president you have tens of thousands of people whose job is just gathering intelligence from around the world to make sure you have the best information possible. Imagine not even having the intellectual curiosity to just read the President’s Daily Brief, which I’m sure included this fact.

— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) 2025-04-26T01:34:16.450Z

On the one hand, Trump publicly saying he doesn’t know anything about what is going on besides what he’s being told might be a lie to try and shift the buck but on the other the evidence for “he is not actually mentally competent to run the country” is getting stronger by the day

— Sky Marchini (@sky.skymarchini.net) 2025-04-25T20:55:56.001Z

…for this to be where I’m starting is

New Ed Martin letter—this time to Wikipedia about its tax-exempt status. In it, he asks about topics including its editorial practices, editor anonymity, "hateful content and conduct by editors," and content used to train LLMs. www.thefp.com/p/trump-pros…Letter: drive.google.com/file/d/1ocNy…

— Sarah McLaughlin (@sarahemclaugh.bsky.social) 2025-04-25T20:22:13.891Z

…I dunno

This would seem to violate Bondi's rules.

— emptywheel (@emptywheel.bsky.social) 2025-04-26T07:51:07.756Z

…maybe I’m hungover

not to tell anyone how to do their jobs or anything but if i was a US attorney i might not write whole letters laying out how i was targeting nonprofits specifically for first amendment protected activities

— Molly White (@molly.wiki) 2025-04-25T22:19:49.383Z

…& that’s what let it get traction

Peter Thiel founded the Stanford Review, which was “devoted mainly to ‘anti-PC’ arguments, defending in particular fellow reviewer Keith Rabois, another future PayPal zillionare who, as a Stanford Law student was involved in ‘screaming ‘Faggot! Hope you die of AIDS!’” at a faculty member. 1/

— Jenny Cohn (@jennycohn.bsky.social) 2025-04-26T04:55:48.154Z

…but…if you pick a widely referenced metaphor with a standard formulation with a specific root reference that you aim to not merely use but adjust in order to imply a distinction…& you even mention the correct root…I feel like it takes a special kind of whatever the opposite of due dilligence is to fuck up this way

The best term for this mentality is “black-pilled,” an online reference, based on a famous scene in “The Matrix,” to different pills that awaken people to hidden realities. A red pill lets you in on secret right-wing truths. A white pill persuades you that the world situation is better than you thought. And a black pill lets you know just how doomed we really are.

…the link is to a youtube clip of the scene itself & even if he were too busy to have watched the thing for the 90secs or so it takes to get around to putting the pills on screen…the red/blue part is in the title…& yes…in the movie it is also the option that lets you see the true face of reality & all…but the line is that the red pill lets you stay in wonderland & see how deep the rabbithole goes…& if you stick to that much of it to pair red with “secret” right-wing “truths”…but replace its function with a black pill…because…I dunno…black is the worst or whatever…&…if we’re unduly charitable to the author maybe flirt with a bit of woke-ry by making the opposite be white-pilled=in-a-bubble-of-it-seems-fine-for-me or whatever…& you write political opinion pieces for the NYT in a nation that operates a red/blue binary for color-coding politics…so the original version of the damn pills is blue=this-is-fine.gif & red=raw-dogging-reality…why drop blue out of your color chart in the first place…& if you’re going to…why are the white-supremecists black-pilled…why are you linking to the red/blue version, keeping the red & leaving out the blue & then making a superfluous black/white distinction…if you think it’s cute or you did a cleverness maybe share that with the class

— Stealthgirl 🫘 (@stealthgirl21.bsky.social) 2025-03-03T18:18:33.176Z

…maybe you actually were shooting for some race overtones…or maybe you’re just one of the most intellectually lazy assholes to ever get paid by that paper to produce pap…who can say?

…& there’s legions of people out there on the internet who will tell you until you can’t take it any more exactly what the film (…ok…films…but…if they set out to make it more than one they wouldn’t have given the protagonist god-mode at the end of the first installment & written themselves into the superman problem that requires you to nerf your boy or there’s no way to make it interesting…& I’m pretty sure even they acknowledged that a few times in a few places) intends the parallel to be…but within the original narrative option blue is don’t rock the boat & stick with the hardly great faux-reality in which you get to be getting by & everyone agrees the world is the way they all think it is…which is kind of a gimme if you’re looking for cheap shots but you’ve left it off the table from the jump for no apparent reason other than making it read like you didn’t watch the movie or the clip you linked to or read the title of the latter & you think the original pairing was red/white…or maybe the implication is that out there in the wilds of the internet a whole pill-rainbow has been developed & it’s normal to pretend like there was never blue in the mix…whatever…but if the red pill is meant to be see-the-true-face-of-reality & not MAGA “facts^®“…maybe don’t link to the rabbit hole quote…or…if red is the color of reality distortion in a true-to-life way…why do you need a black pill…there’s a perfectly servicable analogy available where there’s only one “layer” of reality to peel away & the pills are effectively a representation of a function that isn’t available in reality…so if you jack out of the matrix & then you try for the double dose…now you’re just some fuckwit who takes they-don’t-know-what-drugs that thinks they’re holding a backstage pass to reality because they don’t understand that’s not how any of this works…from the way the thing continues…which pretty much makes clear this whole conceit is intended to be one of convenience that lends itself to drawing attention to shit the author thinks shows others to be not-so-smart…it might even have worked better…but even if it didn’t at least it wouldn’t have come off as so entirely half-assed?

Let me take one illustration of this mentality, from a commentator who goes by the nom de guerre FischerKing and has more than 200,000 followers on X. Calling the American situation an “emergency,” with an added expletive, he writes: “The USA has elected a series of administrations from both parties who have given us a $37 trillion national debt, probably 30-50 million illegal aliens, woke ideology, and a series of pointless wars. But we’re supposed to care about ‘norms.’”

I like this post because it lets me make two points about the problem with the black pill.

…& I like irony…which is basically how I got myself into this thing where I…maybe I’m not really making points, per se…but having pointed out some of the problems I have with your black pill deal it ought to be clear that I do not like your post…&…I strongly suspect…I don’t like you?

First, it overstates the direness of the situation. The United States almost certainly does not have 30 million to 50 million illegal immigrants. A high-end estimate from an anti-immigration advocacy group puts the figure at 18 million to 19 million. That’s a big number; it makes a case for deportations. But it’s far less transformative than 50 million would be.

…word to the in-no-way-visibly-wise…you…probably don’t want to be calling out *other people* for treating baseless reverse-engineered pretextural shite designed to buttress a predetermined position that presumes it to be axiomatic truth that way…not when it’s what the NYT literally pays your ass to do with moderate regularity…let’s just say maybe it’s not the flex you seem to think it is

The 21st-century United States has indeed been embroiled in “a series of pointless wars.” But the debacles of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya are in the past, and U.S. foreign policy has turned in a more realist direction under Democrats as well as Trump. Even if you take a maximally skeptical view of our support for the Ukrainians, the war in Ukraine is a classic proxy conflict, not another Iraq or Vietnam.

…for “real”? …define “pointless” for me, here…then maybe you can work up to explaining how in the actual fuck you wound up contrasting…vietnam…with “a classic proxy conflict”…like it wasn’t?

…you quoted the pointless thing…said you were going to show it up for dumbassery…then stipulate that part to be on the money without defining the term that would appear to turn on…the fate of women in afghanistan before & after there were foreign troops deployed might add up to their net detriment…but surely there’s a pretty glaring implication that there might have been a few points of something that looks sort of principle-shaped in varietal terms that comes with some stark material differences in outcome…as just one of the “for instance”s we could go with at this point…but “iraq (either time) or vietnam is not an example of a classic proxy conflict” is such a looming bit of incredibly credulous pablum it sort of…overshadows it?

Meanwhile, the peak of woke ideology is, for now, in the past: Today, Ibram X. Kendi is increasingly a punchline, the British Supreme Court is vindicating J.K. Rowling, and affirmative action, as well as D.E.I., is on the ropes.

…kendi is a punchline…to some…to others…rowling is part punchline part cautionary tale…& while she might agree that the court vidicated her…it…didn’t…nor did it excuse her…kind of like if the future should happen to include woke ideology having a resurgence that exceed its previous zenith…the possibility of which you decided to hang a lampshade on that way…it just makes calling the latter the peak specifically the wrong word…if you’d said “or certainly appears to be” instead of “for now” at least you wouldn’t be opening with “if I state a thing I’m going to immediately suggest could well prove to be entirely erroneous then…” before trying to make what is presumably a series of subjective observations you think somehow lend the first part further weight…rather than, say, loudly begging the question that if this is a kneejerk reactionary backlash to the traction achieved by perspectives that don’t prioritise unearned advantage to people who act like losing that is the same as the thing they genuinely fear…which would be getting treated the way they demand they should get to treat others…that…that might be a pendulum with the potential energy for an even bigger swing in the other direction still left in its accrued momentum…the density of the chucklefuckery in that one sentence is almost enough to make me think being the author might actually be a fate worse than death

…my mind isn’t necessarily all that friendly to/with me…but…imagine yours snowing you into the belief that putting your name to this & having it printed up in the pages of an internationally recognized newspaper for everyone to see…wasn’t embarrassing…that’s just…cruel…albeit in this case not necessarily unusual?

…taking a finding that effectively said a strict reading of “women only” that excludes those who weren’t women from birth is a legally defensible basis on which to claim that a space employing that definition is not leaving itself open to a charge that it is in contravention of a specific piece of legislation is more akin to the court saying “no we wouldn’t accept a trans-woman suing a women’s refuge for saying they weren’t eligible”…& by extension if a voluntary association of lesbians choose to define their eligibility criteria in a similar fashion they would likewise be within their rights to do so without infringing that statute…that is not the same as saying that language is not a matter of dynamic definitions of terms that adjust over time based on common usage & rowling is “vindicated”…that claim is like saying that because under specific conditions ice can be sublimated into vapor that water no longer exists

In the culture war, conservative success in the struggle against wokeness depends on continuing to convert centrists and even liberals to the cause, and the administration’s all-or-nothing strategy risks making liberal academia sympathetic — a truly counterproductive feat.

…at a bare minimum wokeness ought to be in fucking quotes…but…fuck it…let me give this the ol’ college try…”success” in this being what the author seems to be rooting for to the point of invoking “the stuggle” & “the cause”…with a characteristic absence of intentional irony swamped by the over-supply of the inherent sort it’s bursting at the seams with…depends upon continuing to misrepresent the meaning of the very term you habituate your targets into believing means what you say it does in direct contradiction of the meaning given it for generations…after a fashion the champions of your “cause” have explicitly stated is a deliberate obfuscation through appropriation, mind you…is a thing you freely admit to be counter-productive if only because from your twisted perspective it isn’t that it paints you & your fellow-travelers in an unsympathetic light but that it paints “liberal academia” in a sympathetic one…which just feels like a whole passive-voice sidestep type deal…here’s the thing, though

…in the sex-is-a-characteristic-determined-at-birth “vindication” stakes paradigm you’re ostensibly working with here…you get that you’re playing the trans role in the redefining of “woke”…right?

…there’s a base meaning to the term that is firmly rooted in uncontestable fact…& then there’s your usage of the word that means something altogether different & in many senses diametrically opposed to the other one…that you are engaged in a camapign to have over-write the accepted definition…despite relying on it in order to make so much as a lick of sense in the first place in ways you seem uninclined to examine

[…for the record…I don’t necessarily think that charge lands across the board for people who draw their line at “trans women are women”…& I only intend the parallel in the sense that I think I can make it work for comparitive purposes & I’m fairly certain it would upset anti-woke boy to be told he cast himself as the trans part…any offense intended is unidirectional…so hopefully noting that for a man or a woman to feel they were born into the wrong model & seek to retrofit their reality to match their subjectively-intrinsic identity there kinda has to be a thing they are/aren’t at the outset…& speaking for myself…I don’t see a contradiction between acknowledging that & allowing that under the overwhelming majority of scenarios there really isn’t a problem with referring to someone by the term it appears to those intents & purposes to be appropriate to use…whereas claiming that there’s no longer a meaning to the term man or woman that denotes a state into which people are born that most feel is a natural fit but some don’t because it’s “literally” the same thing as something that requires considerable intervention to achieve physiological alteration…starts to recursively dissolve the constituent elements of its own definition…not in any ideological or partisan-motivated sense but just semantically?]

One reason to stress these aspects of the Trump agenda (and the falling poll numbers that indicate their costs) is that black-pilled conservatives are understandably allergic to being lectured (especially from elite pulpits) that the situation isn’t as bleak as they believe.

Better for the critics to meet the black-pilled halfway — with the suggestion that even in a dire situation, you still need a response calibrated to reality, rather than a furious flailing that most likely guarantees defeat.

Why Is Trump Struggling? His Administration Is Too Black-Pilled. [NYT]

…so…guy with his own “elite pulpit”…& who consistently appears delusional enough to suggest they think they’re doing some lecturing of their own…while evading the pitfalls that might make that something folks might be “understandably allergic to”…makes claim that the preceding column represents “a response calibrated to reality, rather than a furious flailing”…do I have that right?

Contrarianism: Not Even Once

— Aiding And Abetting Terrorists Hat (@kenwhite.bsky.social) 2025-04-25T22:15:26.497Z

…nominative determinism FTW…because I dou(b)t(t)hat

The Trump administration is damaging the pillars of American exceptionalism. They won’t be easy to get back.

— Bloomberg News (@bloomberg.com) 2025-04-26T06:47:31Z

…fuck

While investigating Nike’s claims about sustainability, I started collecting paystubs from its suppliers. It’s been almost 27 years since Phil Knight acknowledged that Nike products had become synonymous with “slave wages.” I wanted to know what people in Asia earned producing Nike apparel. (thread)

— Rob Davis (@robwdavis.bsky.social) 2025-04-25T20:16:14.442Z

…is that the time?

Important work and coverage here by ACLU. Please support them. If US citizens are forcibly removed from their country of citizenship though it is something worse than a deportation.www.aclu.org/press-releas…

— Timothy Snyder (@timothysnyder.bsky.social) 2025-04-26T13:03:12.518Z

NEW: The Trump administration deported a 2-year-old U.S. citizen on Friday.Hours later, a conservative judge who tried to intervene warned of his "strong suspicion" that the administration "just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process."

— Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner.bsky.social) 2025-04-26T03:48:53.011Z

Lots of people I know that were furious about kids having to wear masks are real quiet about a two year old citizen being wrongfully deported

— Josie Duffy Rice (@jduffyrice.bsky.social) 2025-04-26T03:46:37.829Z

[ETA: …belatedly occurred to me that this might fit rather well in this spot]

…oh, well

Pam Bondi Reverses Media Protections to Cover Up Her Complicity in Unlawful Renditionswww.emptywheel.net/2025/04/26/p…

— emptywheel (@emptywheel.bsky.social) 2025-04-26T13:04:44.207Z

This is a major change in how the government presumes to protect news media right to obtain info through leaks, effectively stripping protections. I should add it was pretty quickly leaked to me

— Eoin Higgins (@eoinhiggins.bsky.social) 2025-04-25T20:38:35.783Z

The Attorney General is so unserious. If you’re a prosecutor who is serious about obtaining a conviction, you don’t go on Fox and talk about the (alleged) facts of the case like this. Has Bondi read the Justice Manual? Has Bondi heard of pretrial publicity motions? How about bar ethics rules?

— Anna Bower (@annabower.bsky.social) 2025-04-26T03:58:25.492Z

All else aside, it would be nice if the attorney general knew what treason was.

— Philip Bump (@pbump.com) 2025-04-25T21:10:00.466Z

Treason actually has a definition and it isn’t “people said unflattering things about our wonderful king.”

— Philip Bump (@pbump.com) 2025-04-25T21:12:18.460Z

…guess that’s what I’m lofting then

DOJ personnel don’t comment on anything beyond the four corners of a charging document in order to avoid prejudicing a defendant’s rights. Here’s the policy. The Attorney General of the United States violated it yesterday.

— Joyce White Vance (@joycewhitevance.bsky.social) 2025-04-26T13:59:26.725Z

Pro Legal Tip for certain Feds in Wisconsin . . . bsky.app/profile/vafo…

— Ashland Forest Dweller (@vaforestdweller.bsky.social) 2025-04-25T20:28:03.184Z

…maybe I’ll just festoon the comments with memes from bluesky or something to serve as an apology…& then go scrape together some tunes…but…there’s shit-loads of shit to talk about if anyone feels up to it…& you never know…some of it might match the shed-load of links I could have drawn on instead so could be I might manage to add something vaguely constructive to that sort of thing…stranger things have happened at sea?

Okay so yes, technically, the universe is currently dominated by an invisible mysterious something which will probably destroy it in the very distant future, and new data suggests it might be changing in confusing ways, but on the bright side, the physicists have a LOT of cool new ideas to work with

— Katie Mack (@astrokatie.com) 2025-04-25T17:36:27.290Z

…I guess it’s in keeping with the title…but to borrow a phrase I probably don’t deserve to from the late great richard pryor…it got good to me…so…I should probably go ahead & literally 86 this before it gets entirely out of hand?