…what a prize…he was probably just working out how he was gonna sell “I called bibi – who does what I tell him – & told him not to…but he already had so he didn’t not…but he woulda more if it wasn’t for me” to the lady from the BBC when he talked to her on the phone later…gotta rest up to be on your game?
this much discourse about the city of new york all at once is dangerous and unsustainable. in order to generate enough attention for something happening elsewhere in the united states to break through the zeitgeist, i propose that we immediately blow up the state of indiana
…maybe…if he hadn’t gone to take that nap at the game…he could have called sooner?
for me, it’s not about this so much, it’s about me being a consumer of information, not performance, and the effort put into performance very frequently eclipses the effort put into the quality of information
the main problem with video as a format is that it’s too slow at dispensing information. I can read much faster than you can talk and there’s no way you can address this without becoming incomprehensible to most of the audience.
a lot of people want that performance, and that’s fine, i guess, it’s not up to me to judge, but i’m not one of them
…hmm…that might be seditious talk…the president is a sizzle-reel-only kind of briefing guy…& you’re kinda making him sound like a dumb asshole…even though he knows there’s a b in dumb
part of what makes Platner discourse so miserable is that his coalition is not cleanly ideological. ryan grim is not a liberal, MattY is not a leftist, and they're both sympathetic to him
What if we just got rid of the tech industry and started over? What if there’s no point to an industry that mostly invents new chocolate and cheese flavors of the panopticon?
SignalTrace "links devices that regularly travel together, correlating them to license plate." It is a surveillance product that will sweep up and add all sorts of Bluetooth and other data to license plate readers, linking specific devices—and people—to cars.
OKAY, let’s do this, give the people what they want(with many thanks to all y’all who tagged me)NYAYAM is free to try, btw, you can just hit it up in the browser. That’s what I did.
i think that it is probably bad to heavily use LLMs when writing but probably not as bad as citing a MIT Media Lab study based on a technique less reliable than phrenology
"83% of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term 'cognitive debt' for the lingering deficit."
…someone commented that it seems more of a phenomenon in the states than europe which might mean it isn’t just “it’s phones”…but…it also maybe isn’t just moaning for the hell of it?
We replaced textbooks with "ed tech." Half the time my kids need to study for a test, they can't access the information they were taught in class bc it's all fragmented behind various apps. If you want your kids to retain any information, you have to re-teach at home. This is where we are at.
…either way…the legal chatbot that tells you it has attorney-client invocation powers it doesn’t have the license to bear before asking you to put into words that can be produced in discovery any & all things that might harm your defense…guess you’re safe from that if you can’t read…so…silver lining?
Someone could write an entire dissertation on Mike Lee, posters madness, and the decline of American governance in the 21st century
By my count that’s two players, a ref, and several coaching/technical staff from various nations so far.
Reports that a referee on FIFA’s World Cup list from Africa has been turned back after trying to enter the US for the tournament. Surely, this is basic stuff FIFA should have ironed out well before now. FIFA has been, as usual, contacted for comment.
The players were eventually allowed in/got their visas.
Presumably you already know about the Iran team only being allowed into the US just in time to play their games, and being required to leave immediately afterwards? bsky.app/profile/ligh…
it is darkly funny that his son got married and he was like "ohhhhh uhhhh something popped up, you know, the war, I gotta do work on the war that night, unfortunately I just can't go" and then 2 weeks later, same war still going on, he's shutting down midtown Manhattan to watch the Knicks
No disrespect to Dan, but I stopped at "the forever wars his country sent him to fight."When you join up to get in the action, you haven't been "sent." I have always hated the phrasing that tries to make all post-1991 deployments like Vietnam, with boys being drafted and sent to some faraway war.
…ok…I heard linus torvalds talking to an audience about stuff that included AI & at one point in that he admitted he got annoyed when he heard people say “all our code is now written by AI”…because….akshully…he’s pretty sure all their code is written by compilers…like his…& their code is taken by assemblers & it’s those that produce the machine code that actually runs…&…linus is the kinda “real one” that took a while to stop writing raw code of the sort assemblers spit out & some time later admitting compilers were pretty neat
Man, gotta go back to the Greek version of this, where the original sin is boats.It's a repeated motif in Greek literature (a *famously* seafaring society) that the invention of the ship was a profane violence against the gods, a sacrilegious rupture of nature.
the weird recurring brand of anti-agriculture claims is just an Eden myth in a faintly new costume. there was a Perfect World in which You Did Not Have to Work and there was No Suffering and then original sin (farming) was commited.
…but…linus…was *there*, man…you kinda can’t argue with that…plus…like the part where he admits that he only codes for personal projects these days & his job where the linux kernel is concerned is actually mostly dealing with people…&…he wouldn’t use AI to deal with people…so…well…it helps to not be talking complete shite, I guess?
one of the major problems with that book is that the facts in it which are not simply made up are often wrong
Graeber and Wengrow just published a bestselling non-fuction book about how this entire line of reasoning is deeply flawed
…I…don’t imagine I can imagine the cognitive inertia baked in if you grow up in a world in which slavery is literally the secret to your lavish margin…but…let’s see…if…x is enough to feed a person & you have agriculture such that it takes y people z hours to do that…if z is too many hours for the y to make enough x for the number of those…you’re kinda all fucked…so…on the one hand…we’ve been working on getting z down so hard that y is a pretty small number but farmers all still get to complain that it never bloody stops…& the distinction between a cotton-picking ante-bellum plantation slave & some peasant working a leige lord’s land…might be somewhat academic…but…also…probably does exist
Wood's *Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787* is probably one of my top 5 books in US History. It came out in 1969. I read it in grad school in the 1990s. I wanted my students to get a taste of it so I assigned a chapter in my US to 1865 class this past semester.uncpress.org/978080784723…
Seeing videos where people are snarky about saying "Oh you idiot, don't you know food surpluses lead to inequality?" without bothering to think for a moment about the trade-offs is gonna turn me insane
This is one of those "yeah, but" situations where Yeah, agriculture created several new ways for people to be shitty to each other, But:A) hunter gatherers also had war and slaveryB) farming allows much higher population densitiesC) farming decreased the proportion of adults who died violently
Then go live in the woods. You can, single handedly, opt out of agriculture. I can’t singhandley bring about social democracy but if you want to live without consuming the fruits of agriculture, go do it. You can live a hunger gatherer lifestyle, today, right now.
Hunter-gatherer, but that’s a pretty apt typo. If I were a deranged billionaire I would buy a massive reserve and keep it as a preserve for the single purpose of putting these people there. can live there for free in perpetuity contingent on them bringing no technology & never leaving.
Comparing Neolithic farming communities to their neighbouring Mesolithic hunter-gatherers the farmers have the worse deal; skeletal remains show they’re literally more likely to be malnourished, live shorter lives, be physically shorter etc. But there are more of them and they’re more territorial.
for hunter-gatherers in most years, staying alive was less work than for settled agricultural people. this is because populations were low. the reasons populations were low is that in the years when settled agricultural peoples suffered a moderate famine, 75% of hunter-gatherers died.
…we live in a world
“The farmers always killed the hunter gatherers”, what do you think about the relative strength of those two modes of social organization that when it got violent one always died at the hands of the other? Any possible conclusions we can draw from this?
Yeah I am not a farm-romanticizer whatsoever: there is a reason that most of human civilization is trying to get someone else to do the farming. But there’s also a reason everyone moved towards farming because if you like to have say, cities, it’s kinda a necessity.
this is def not a ‘Europeans’ vs ‘colonized’ type thing to be clear, this applies to like literally everyone from Egyptians to the Aztecs to the Romans: you remember the societies that farmed because they built cities and the hunter-gatherers mostly died.
It's hazardous enough to entangle moral judgements with historical analysis when we're talking about things that happened within the last couple hundred years. To talk of right and wrong by our lights for events in 3000 BC or whatever is… I mean, "anachronistic" is a hell of an understatement.
I'm reminded of how it's profoundly difficult to get a handle on the moral universe of classical civilization because it's so alien to how we think, running off concepts we find unfathomably weird, and yet they are still vastly closer to us than the dawn of agricultural civilization was to them.
And, like, even in indigenous American history, a lot of the famous hunter-gatherer groups were basically the result of whatever splintered the Mississippian Culture, Old World disease destroying populations, and horses making it more viable to hunt. Like, the Lakota were farmers once!
There are Pueblos in New Mexico that grew enough food to have multi-year grain surpluses. Agriculture in North America is 10,000 years old. One of the last places to form agricultural societies was Northern Europe.
Exactly! And New World agriculture was some of the finest in human history. Maize alone is an incredible process of cultivation. Not only developing it, but figuring out how to use it successfully, makes wheat looks like such a walk in the park.
This is an extremely ahistorical claim. Blood and soil (i.e. ethno-linguistic) nationalism is a modern creature of the 19th C. and more importantly, is just as much an ideological narrative, not some neutral alternative. And one that has often torn countries apart over its ideological commitments.
Milei “said he wants to…allow companies run by machines” & has also “announced a ‘social digital twin’ program, which wld use publicly available citizen data to create simulations intended to inform public policy…” (Thiel recently moved to Argentina & OpenAI opened a data center there.) 6/5/26 1/
I’m assuming by pet projects he’s got chimps and orangutans in his basement and is trying to create hybrids
Been laughing at this for 45 minutes straight
To those who think he’s “doing a bit” He got community noted and is currently losing it. I worry for this guy’s family as the lawsuit he’s involved in isn’t going well and he hasn’t hit the engagement numbers he had back in the summer for the antiwoke slop he churns out
…sigh…for…uh…”real”
He’s given himself such severe antiwoke psychosis even his friends are concerned.
…other dipshits are available…in lamentable profusion
this is like the Platonic thomas chatterton williams joint. as always, the locus of responsibility in american society is the "woke" left, and as always, williams believes history began sometime in the 2010s.
…seriously, though…the chatty lawyer bot…fuck a dumb-confession-machine problem…assume your position is one where you aren’t in prison jeopardy…can it still fuck you?
As with the other legal LLM's I've poked at, it does fine with really obvious Social Security issues, but doesn't grasp important nuance. 1/10
So the hypothetical person I've created for myself to perform this experiment is a 20-year old whose father was killed in a car accident when he was 15, started part-time work as a teenager to try to help out his mom, and was diagnosed with Alper's disease at 18.2/10
…shit…in a few years…why would there even still *be* lawyers
Now, I picked Alper's for two reasons. 1) It's a compassionate allowance condition and should receive special attention in an application. 2) It usually manifests at either a very young age or as a young adult. A good issue spotter should catch on to both of those.3/10
The hypothetical person is very young! They don't need to have much of a work history to qualify for their own SSDI benefits and, importantly, because the disability began before 22 they can get benefits from a parent's record if the parent is retired, deceased, or disabled. 5/10
The person I created would be eligible for Disabled Adult Child benefits, but the bot didn't even bother to ask the most basics to find out, even though someone asking about their own Alper's disease case almost certainly has to be the right age for a possible DAC case. 6/10
So the bot does catch the Compassionate Allowance issue, but then it tells me that DDS decisions are typically 3-6 months (they're typically 12 months in Florida right now). 7/10
It summarizes the financial eligibility requirements, but didn't bother to ask me anything about whether I might meet them in its six question "interview."8/10
Ultimately it completely misses the eligibility I should have for a program which will pay me significantly more benefits than SSI, DAC. Now, a competent SSA staffer *should* catch this issue when I apply, but the supply of those is rapidly dwindling. 9/10
The question I'd like to ask it next is "Am I still eligible for SSI if I have an inheritance from my father?" to really beat it over the head with the DAC issue and see if it still misses it, but alas, I apparently have to pay for a "deeper analysis."Don't outsource your reasoning to LLMs!10/10
Post-script: DAC or SSDI benefits would also get my hypothetical person access to better medical insurance than SSI would, but likely only after he's died of Alper's. And that's exactly why Congress created the Medicare waiting period, to avoid having to pay for medical care for the sickest people.
It is an extremely in-character thing for Donald Trump to ruin the evening of tens of thousands of people so he can attend an event where he will also have a bad time.
correct me if I'm wrong here, but…1) this chatbot isn't a lawyer so no information provided is protected under attorney/client privilege, right?2) people have had their chatbot conversation logs subpoenaed right?
…I mean…I accept you have to go pretty fucking far to make making kash patel your FBI guy & todd blanche an AG look like they aren’t the dumbest moves getting made…but…fucking ooof, my dude…I dunno…just…fucking…wow
User privacy is super important! And also, there’s no way to make this invulnerable to subpoena without also making it lawfully their legal counsel, which it never will be able to do.
…I hear you, lady…I’m not even convinced they convinced me it works, period?
A legal department would just tell them not to engage in the unauthorized practice of law.It's painfully obvious a lot of these folks are embracing AI because they don't like being told they can't do things by people they think are supposed to help them lie and cheat.
i think the odds of blanche being confirmed are very low and the odds of him accidentally admitting to a felony in his hearing are high
…they could just ditch blanche & use the bot…not sure we’d spot the difference
blanche just got his ass handed to him behind closed doors by senate republicans last week and the pulte nomination already has most of them pissed off, the white house is totally out of touch with even their own congressional allies at this point, and this will make that worse, root for injuries […] there’ll be people who look at this and think it’s a signal that the white house believes they can act with impunity, but i think it’s more of a signal that the administration is both completely out of touch with reality and struggling very badly with finding staff
like, this isn’t a sign of strength, it’s a sign of an increasingly bubbled president and an admin that’s completely closed ranks around him to keep him in the bubble, walled off even from the congressional allies they need
…not for nothing…but the various big tech concerns who might have a concern or two about needing &/or wanting more debt than they can either service or find a reliable source for now looking to try a spaceX-style bid to either float or dilute with another tranche so the public-facing markets can throw some money at their sacred pyres…they…may or may not be smart to be trading that for equity…or they may have an even more fucked set of by-laws than the ones that say you can’t get the musk out of your spaceX any more than you can explain why it made sense to fold all the liabilities that are burning money into that if you…aren’t that guy…either way…they don’t most likely *want* to be shaving off equity to finance stuff…but…they are, tho
The reality is that before iPhones our main non-video game recreation was Breaking the Law
Before iPhone, teens were hanging out at the local Youth Club. They were partaking of various no-cost community offerings with low access barriers. Before iPhone the kids were interfacing at locally-funded spaces
I think every politician who proposes to ban anything on the internet for teens should be required to propose, as an alternate, a free and accessible and all weather space for teens to hang out in their own hometown
to be clear that proposal should be nationwide and fully funded, for every teenager’s hometown, and not be located in or associated with a school
and also there should be a space in specifically in that politicians hometown
Usually minor laws but turns out there’s lots of those
…it was a simpler time
Smoking doobies and fishing without a license, who amongst us
Why would you want a build an entirely new program that reaches every kid and not associate it with a school, the giant existing infrastructure that already does that
If seeing Matt Taibbi get kicked in the dick by a federal judge is your particular jam, he's done it again. This time his defamation suit against Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove is DOA.Westfall Act's a bitch, man. And so are you!storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us…
Seriously. And quite honestly, nobody from another country should come here, much less Iranians. I’m sorry, save your money and go next year to wherever the hell it is. We’re going to see all kinds of stories about soccer tourists from every country getting unlawfully detained.
honestly…im half expecting players to get detained
seems the world cup is just another thing trump will destroy….and whilst fifa absolutely deserve to go down in flames… i cant help but be kinda sad about the world cup getting defiled like this
Well, to be fair, who would think that the winner of the FIFA Peace Prize would be a dementia-addled, xenophobic bigot without the capacity to link cause and effect?
I would say that would require MAGA to be in or near big cities, which are not their strongholds. We might see some, but given how spread out the tournament is, it’s not like they’re all coming to one place and the difference might be pretty negligible in most places.
That said, I do think ICE might try and go hunting, and that would be a real black mark. Even the Nazis let Jesse Owens run and then come home, y’know? Like we might not even be able to clear that bar.
Agree. MAGA avoids big cities. My MAGA relatives are dumbfounded when I want to go to New York or Chicago. They truly believe they are burned-out husks with roving gangs of cannibals. I thought my sister was going to have a stroke when I talked about riding the subway with my wife and daughter.
Go *in four years*, to wherever it is, but YES!!!!
Skip this one. Hell FIFA’s been corrupt for at *minimum* a couple decades, and NEVER should’ve allowed us to host the cup *anyway*! (Even if it was passed off as “North America”–Canada & Mexico aren’t the jackassess, WE are the problem!!!
Also, folks may wanna start thinking about boycotting the LA Olympics in 2028–because they *may* be a rehash of Berlin, circa 1938🫤🤷♀️
I know I’ve said this before but if I were on the Iranian team, I wouldn’t attend the tournament. You’re just asking to become a political prisoner, and Trump’s people are absolutely dumb enough to think that’s a good idea.
ive already seen comments on the interwebs referring to them as free hostages….and considering that was on twatter…theres a pretty good chance the current administration is also thinking along those lines
guess we’re going to find out when the iranian team leaves mexico to go play its first match
It’s pretty wild that places like Qatar and Russia were like “of course everyone can come for this showcase” and America’s like nah, we’re too fucking racist for that.
I suspect the World Cup is too big to fail, but this year’s checks all the boxes on outrageous prices, terrible amenities, rancid vibes, authoritarian danger and sub-standard play (given the extra teams and knockout round).
I still expect stadiums to be full, though, but maybe some of the lower-tier games might see soft sales, which would actually be a pretty big embarrassment if these people were capable of that emotion.
In this case, I think the U.S. counts for small team! Lot of fans, but not those who travel like the big powers, and tickets are $2,000 a pop or whatever, so you’re cutting off 90% of people who would go.
That post with Mike Lee getting ratioed by MAGAs for promoting heresy is pretty much guaranteed to be the funniest thing I read today. Well, except for MAGA trying to spin the booing Trump received last night.
But the funniest part is the Mormons don’t think they’re heretics despite the fact that their entire history pre Utah was fleeing the Xtian Tyranny who called them heretics to a new land called Utah (The OG Battlestar Galactica was based on the Mormon Trek.)
Which is funny because as you say, their entire origin story is “and then the angry mob chased us further west” but that mental shift does tend to happen once you put down stakes and get some money and influence and think you’re made but you’re just in the club, not part of it.
Lost somehow under the 32 other giant red flags on Platner is that not only was he not “sent” to the military, once he left the military he signed on again as a fucking mercenary. That dude wanted to be exactly where he was, again and again, and I think it’s absolutely fair to ask “So, uh, why?”
Well, no one can know what’s in someone else’s heart but I think a strong case could be made that the reason is “so I can kill people who don’t look like me.”
IMO doesn’t matter if he wanted it or not, it clearly didn’t bother him in the least, and that’s bad enough. It’s nice that he’s spouting left-adjacent talking points now but I think it’s more than fair to point out that he took one of the absolutely most vile jobs — by choice — in the history of capitalistic society (“slave trader” is maybe the only worse one?) and it’s again worth asking what was up with that. Especially when he kept going back long after “Americans see Iraq as a popular war of vengeance” was dead and dusted.
People think racism has declined or gone away because people don’t put on hoods or burn crosses, but like … this is the same as that. Racism is so sensible as to be conventional wisdom; being called racist is the real violent slur.
In a lot of ways, framing racism as a reasonable response to circumstances is worse. Most people, even racists, are repulsed by a burning cross. But the racists can just nod along with Oz because there’s no visceral reaction to his “reasonableness.”
You mentioned it earlier with the “my family can’t believe I survived the subway” but ultimately … that’s racism! It’s not direct or violent or even something I suspect people would connect to race at all because it’s been scrubbed down into something that sounds anodyne on its face … but they hate cities (and have been told to hate cities) because minorities live there. These people don’t have hard opinions on zoning policy or whatever. But they know who tends to live in cities so they must be violent hell holes (or at least they are willing to believe the propagnda that tells them so.)
Oh Doc Oz. You’re not a REAL Murrican. You’re Turkish!
Infected with the same racist superior snotty classism that my Murrican MAGAt Uncle and Aunt are. They (and mom) looked down on black people. Felt superior to, etc.
You think the same rich whities don’t look at you the same way?
I thought the same thing, actually. Like, oh, buddy, just look at what MAGA is doing to Mike Lee. You ain’t one of them and you never will be no matter what you do or say.
world cup of shit fuckery
https://www.reuters.com/sports/soccer/iran-says-ticket-allocation-world-cup-withdrawn-days-before-tournament-2026-06-09/
tho admittedly…im not even a little bit surprised the tickets got pulled… i am however surprised that theres apparently iranians crazy enough to try and watch the games in person in the states
Seriously. And quite honestly, nobody from another country should come here, much less Iranians. I’m sorry, save your money and go next year to wherever the hell it is. We’re going to see all kinds of stories about soccer tourists from every country getting unlawfully detained.
honestly…im half expecting players to get detained
seems the world cup is just another thing trump will destroy….and whilst fifa absolutely deserve to go down in flames… i cant help but be kinda sad about the world cup getting defiled like this
Well, to be fair, who would think that the winner of the FIFA Peace Prize would be a dementia-addled, xenophobic bigot without the capacity to link cause and effect?
hell…apparently i spoke too late…the us has already held an iraqi player for 7 hours….and refused a referee entry to the country
https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/cnv9drg0qzgo
Because the Ref is from Somalia.
And Trump (and his admin!) *hates* everyone from Somalia.
Ironic, on that, too, because such a “big strong man!” like Trumpty-Dumpty is so frickin’ scared of Ilhan–a woman who is so *tiny*!!!
She’s like five feet tall, and she’s super petite!
But because the Douchebros are *terrified* of smart black women?
They act like she’s a damn Valkyrie!🙄🙄🙄
And they do *stupid* shit, like blocking one of the most respected refs in the game🙄🤬🤦♀️
betchu she could take him
byt yeah,….stupid shit..for sad pitiful reasons,,,
I’m actually more worried about MAGA shitbags hassling/abusing the foreign tourists, because there’s so much more opportunity for shit to go sideways.
I would say that would require MAGA to be in or near big cities, which are not their strongholds. We might see some, but given how spread out the tournament is, it’s not like they’re all coming to one place and the difference might be pretty negligible in most places.
That said, I do think ICE might try and go hunting, and that would be a real black mark. Even the Nazis let Jesse Owens run and then come home, y’know? Like we might not even be able to clear that bar.
Agree. MAGA avoids big cities. My MAGA relatives are dumbfounded when I want to go to New York or Chicago. They truly believe they are burned-out husks with roving gangs of cannibals. I thought my sister was going to have a stroke when I talked about riding the subway with my wife and daughter.
Go *in four years*, to wherever it is, but YES!!!!
Skip this one. Hell FIFA’s been corrupt for at *minimum* a couple decades, and NEVER should’ve allowed us to host the cup *anyway*! (Even if it was passed off as “North America”–Canada & Mexico aren’t the jackassess, WE are the problem!!!
Also, folks may wanna start thinking about boycotting the LA Olympics in 2028–because they *may* be a rehash of Berlin, circa 1938🫤🤷♀️
I know I’ve said this before but if I were on the Iranian team, I wouldn’t attend the tournament. You’re just asking to become a political prisoner, and Trump’s people are absolutely dumb enough to think that’s a good idea.
ive already seen comments on the interwebs referring to them as free hostages….and considering that was on twatter…theres a pretty good chance the current administration is also thinking along those lines
guess we’re going to find out when the iranian team leaves mexico to go play its first match
It’s pretty wild that places like Qatar and Russia were like “of course everyone can come for this showcase” and America’s like nah, we’re too fucking racist for that.
Oh, yeah. They’re going to think they can end the war by taking hostages.
I hope this collapses or there’s a lot fewer fans in the crowd.
I suspect the World Cup is too big to fail, but this year’s checks all the boxes on outrageous prices, terrible amenities, rancid vibes, authoritarian danger and sub-standard play (given the extra teams and knockout round).
I still expect stadiums to be full, though, but maybe some of the lower-tier games might see soft sales, which would actually be a pretty big embarrassment if these people were capable of that emotion.
Funny you should mention …
With just days left, the U.S. opening match at the World Cup is still not sold out
In this case, I think the U.S. counts for small team! Lot of fans, but not those who travel like the big powers, and tickets are $2,000 a pop or whatever, so you’re cutting off 90% of people who would go.
That post with Mike Lee getting ratioed by MAGAs for promoting heresy is pretty much guaranteed to be the funniest thing I read today. Well, except for MAGA trying to spin the booing Trump received last night.
But the funniest part is the Mormons don’t think they’re heretics despite the fact that their entire history pre Utah was fleeing the Xtian Tyranny who called them heretics to a new land called Utah (The OG Battlestar Galactica was based on the Mormon Trek.)
Which is funny because as you say, their entire origin story is “and then the angry mob chased us further west” but that mental shift does tend to happen once you put down stakes and get some money and influence and think you’re made but you’re just in the club, not part of it.
Lost somehow under the 32 other giant red flags on Platner is that not only was he not “sent” to the military, once he left the military he signed on again as a fucking mercenary. That dude wanted to be exactly where he was, again and again, and I think it’s absolutely fair to ask “So, uh, why?”
Well, no one can know what’s in someone else’s heart but I think a strong case could be made that the reason is “so I can kill people who don’t look like me.”
IMO doesn’t matter if he wanted it or not, it clearly didn’t bother him in the least, and that’s bad enough. It’s nice that he’s spouting left-adjacent talking points now but I think it’s more than fair to point out that he took one of the absolutely most vile jobs — by choice — in the history of capitalistic society (“slave trader” is maybe the only worse one?) and it’s again worth asking what was up with that. Especially when he kept going back long after “Americans see Iraq as a popular war of vengeance” was dead and dusted.
Oz comes out in favor of racism.
People think racism has declined or gone away because people don’t put on hoods or burn crosses, but like … this is the same as that. Racism is so sensible as to be conventional wisdom; being called racist is the real violent slur.
In a lot of ways, framing racism as a reasonable response to circumstances is worse. Most people, even racists, are repulsed by a burning cross. But the racists can just nod along with Oz because there’s no visceral reaction to his “reasonableness.”
You mentioned it earlier with the “my family can’t believe I survived the subway” but ultimately … that’s racism! It’s not direct or violent or even something I suspect people would connect to race at all because it’s been scrubbed down into something that sounds anodyne on its face … but they hate cities (and have been told to hate cities) because minorities live there. These people don’t have hard opinions on zoning policy or whatever. But they know who tends to live in cities so they must be violent hell holes (or at least they are willing to believe the propagnda that tells them so.)
Oh Doc Oz. You’re not a REAL Murrican. You’re Turkish!
Infected with the same racist superior snotty classism that my Murrican MAGAt Uncle and Aunt are. They (and mom) looked down on black people. Felt superior to, etc.
You think the same rich whities don’t look at you the same way?
I thought the same thing, actually. Like, oh, buddy, just look at what MAGA is doing to Mike Lee. You ain’t one of them and you never will be no matter what you do or say.
I mean, *as* a Minnesotan?
The *words* there aren’t wrong!
We don’t like the assholes who complain about “The Somalians”, because that shit *IS* totally racist!
If yiu wanna complain about an individual person, or a few you know personally–that’s a different story.
But scapegoating an *entire* population?
That’s racist a.f., and we WILL call you out on it!🤷♀️
As far as “Worst thing you can be in Minnesota?
Noooooo.
That’s still the ICE assholes–Racists are a close *second*!
I feel bad for the lawyers who have to undo the “AI lawyer” damage done to their clients.
I feel giddy for the lawyers who get to go up against clients with “AI lawyers.”
When your own defense lawyer chooses the other guy…you suck!
https://www.notus.org/2026-election/ken-paxton-lawyer-james-talarico-endorsement
I’m sure this will help end the war!
https://popular.info/p/update-trump-administration-looking
So….a grifter and a spy? Perfect fit!
https://www.icij.org/investigations/paradise-papers/trump-intelligence-adviser-previously-helped-father-pursue-millions-from-kremlin-linked-bank-leaked-documents-show/
Best people!
…don’t you just love mondays?
RR redid an oldie but a goodie w/ new lyrics…
So now he is finally acknowledging he was booed & blaming that for why Knicks lost? Not that everything he touches turns to shit?