…it was pretty…quaint, I guess…but…people used to take the sunday omnibus edition of a paper the way you’d think of a digest for the news of the preceding week…rather than
…a preview of what next week’s mess will be kicking off with?
That there’s not a massive, credible, instant, bipartisan impeachment/25th Amendment move over these senseless and destructive Greenland threats is a sign of how broken our politics are — and especially how broken the Republican Party is.
…but…I dunno…back then people had all sorts of funny ideas about things like presidents…&…peanut farms
Nothing to see here folks, just a sitting president investing in two companies whose merger he claims sole authority to approve or reject. Totally normal! 🙃
How sad is this? The CDC closed its FOIA office, so this story could only be published because a Danish journalist provided Rolling Stone with the documents, after obtaining them through a freedom of information request to the University of Southern Denmarkwww.rollingstone.com/politics/pol…
“It is the most shattering experience of a US President‘s life when one morning he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself ‘I will never defeat the Dane.’
“When that moment comes, one’s ambition ceases.”
…ok…so that’s a movie reference…but…whatever…there’s…sort of a…theme?
Bovino isn’t cosplaying Hitler. He’s cosplaying Himmler. An American left that can’t tell the difference had no business talking about fascism. by Curtis Yarvin
…you could be forever just trying to figure out how you’d decide which was worse
Another video, taken by a north Minneapolis resident from across the street…shows federal agents firing numerous times into the house, breaking a second-floor window.…at least five people, including one small child, are in a house while law enforcement lights flash outside.
The Trump admin is moving to quickly deport two men who witnessed, they say, ICE guards choke a fellow detainee to death. The admin moved to deport men right after they spoke the Washington Post.This is the death that the medical examiner has already ruled likely homicide. wapo.st/4qR1T1U
The more I think about this, the angrier I get. It takes a particularly virulent strain of sociopathy to sit and let hard-working people serve you a meal knowing that you plan to arrest them and send them off for deportation once they're off of work.Really depraved shit.
J6er, Jake Lang, was escorted away after trying to organize a pro-ICE/anti-Islam march. He was going to burn the Koran with bacon inside when he was handed his ass and escorted away. #ICE #FuckICE #Pinks #ProudBlue #Minnesota #J6er
…well…I dunno…might be…but…starting to seem like maybe everything really does look like a nail…because it seems like the “all of it seems to be [a this]” takes abound…even though there seem to be a lot more options for your [this] than I’ve ever seen different designs for hammers…so
“In one of the most astonishing political transformations in the history of democracy,” Hitler destroyed “a constitutional republic through constitutional means,” Timothy W. Ryback wrote last year. Read about how Hitler overcame democracy in just 53 days:
Four GOP Senators.At most four Repubs in the House.Together they could stop nearly all the mad-king's rampages. They would be known to history as Profiles in Courage. They might/would lose the next election. But people have sacrificed a lot more, for a lot less.
I've said this before and I'll say it again.It would only take a tiny handful of Republican Congress members or senators to stop the slide of America toward authoritarian fascism, but nope. They're all in.
…but…far as the cynicism thing goes…tech-enabled as the current crop might be…it has been observed by a number of people that…in the past…things were worse…& people with less resources did more to change that with less…& that might strike some as disingenuous…but people who were the literal sort of slaves…whether or not you believe there was a material difference between the chattel sort & the effective sort you can still squeeze out of stuff like prison labor…back in the day when those people took their life in their hands if they let on they could read…who believed that there would be a day when enslavement would be considered an injustice rather than a fact of life that society deemed a necessary component of a functional civilization…so believing that men who couldn’t clear the bar for mediocre in any context not specifically tailored to perform as their comfort zone…might end us all…is…well…I dunno about me, necessarily…but…like…you lot are better than that…you just…are…it’s not even really a question when you think of it that way
From the man who brought us Brexit – soo we really trust his judgement?
…see…there’s people that listen to these people…&…some of those people listen to them in a way that seems like they take notes so if they accidentally hear someone else they know which bits to get mad about & what line to trot out to match if they want to feel like they devastatingly withered whoever it was that said the thing like nigel does all those jumped up supercilious people that try to make him always look like a fuckwit on the telly that they never liked on account of how they think they’re too good for themselves…they…think big bits of famous cities are no-go zones to police where everything is like mad max but you can still get the papers & the milk from a little shop on the corner that never closes run by the sort of family you think should never have been allowed to ruin your priceless heritage by providing you cut-price convenience at all hours…to work longer & harder for less to literally make it cost you less time & effort to make up for whatever you failed to remember to include when you did the shopping…or to still be open & working & serving you hot food when the place you got hammered for hours after work lets even those workers call it a night…those…lazy scroungers…that nige will save you from…his boy don is scourging that out of america now so it’s safe & you could go there & be your best-est bigot self & probably nobody would even shoot you…that’s how safe it is now…not like downtown…bristol…or…whatever
Investigating elected officials for speech is not law enforcement but intimidation. If governors and mayors can be investigated for criticizing federal actions, neither elected officials nor anyone else is truly free to speak. #holdfast
…still…maybe the cynicism thing has something to it…I mean…I don’t think it’s not true that statement got made by walz…or particularly that it couldn’t have shown up looking just that way on Xitter…but…I did consider trying to go find a different instance of it showing up in the bluesky way that embeds so conveniently & generally hems in my tendency to start block quoting things like nobody has anything else to do today…just because…”the” steady state (vets)…only so many of those sorts of handles I can run to before I start thinking I’m not really looking at the layer of this onion I’m trying to…you know?
These are DHS agents not MPD according to their uniforms. What federal crime was the dancing fox reasonably suspected of?
Hey folks👋🏻It appears that the racist maggots was chased out of town today by the brave people of Minnesota🤣No one wants these Deplorable’s around spreading hate , bigotry and fear! They really should slither back under the rocks they came out of👏🏽#DemVoice1#DemsUnited#ProudBlue
…maybe what elsievoteblue is doing…or the steadystatevets…is necessary…or even helpful…but…it isn’t the same as what radley balko is doing…even if you come by it in the same way in the same place in a similar format?
…to me…that feels like a kind of middle ground between the two…you get the caption to get across the part where the inter-mediating account wants to convey that they think these people are clowns & there’s derisory glee getting invoked…but the source is an actual local outlet if you want to follow up…&…not to make out there’s no place for the sort of cross-posting thing that plays to the like-minded even if they aren’t of like mind about which social media they browse
A message for active duty and reserve military. #ProudBlue #Pinks #Resist
…because it’s trying to convey too many different kinds of inter-related information…but…if you get your head around it…here & there people have pulled remarkable clarity out of chaos
…so…maybe it doesn’t mean anything in the grand scheme of things…but “the president’s personal paramilitary personnel” seems a more accurate term than “federal law enforcement officers”?
…officers…sort of connotes that there’s something official about the office they’re officer-ing when you call them that…&…I’m getting increasingly salty about getting told this or that gripe I have is “just semantics” when the only shit propping any of this up seems to be lip service to shit that isn’t even slightly true let alone accurate barring a tenuous contortion of…the fucking semantics?
Evergreen: “The men who were less-skilled at the game and performing worse relative peers—made frequent, nasty comments to female gamers. In other words, sexist dudes are literally losers.” www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-int…
…&…yes…the cheating at video games thing is news old enough to be considered fossilized in the modern media ecosystem…but…it was still more recent than some recent references
DT having a private army to do his bidding is exactly what he needs to avoid having to leave office. He learned that last time when the military didn’t automatically do everything he wanted.
…if you had to write it like a parody skit for SNL or something in a D&D game night scenario…they’ve spent all week scheming on how to stack niche modifiers & loopholes to somehow suggest that their dogshit mess of a character can mary sue a dragon to death…& the DM is enabling them…while everyone else at the table takes turns in stopping one another from knocking the pair of them out because they want to play the actual game & at some point it’s supposed to get to be someone else’s turn?
New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen, leading Democrat on Foreign Relations, currently in Denmark on cross-party mission, on Trump’s threat to Europe: “My first thought was, Vladimir Putin wrote that.”
…it’s…not article 5…quite…but…he cited less than 10 countries for his bout of collective punishment billed to…US businesses & consumers…&…does not appear to understand how the EU works any more than he wants it to continue to?
5 months ago Trump demanded UCLA pay him $1 billion to restore its funding.Now Trump is monetizing peace and demanding nations pay him $1 billion.Outright Mafia racketeering and extortion, just on a global scale.
…assuming we get there…it’s gonna be wild to see what this looks like in hindsight…to people who either somehow missed it…or didn’t arrive until after the performance
Never made sense that the while Democrats were warning us that Trump would deploy DHS as his private storm troopers, they were passing bills that raised DHS funding to record levels.
…not least when you think about what a number the covid years did on everyone’s sense of the passage of time…it’s like being in some sort of limbo where some things keep ticking while the clock seems stopped on others until it’s like “soft time” or something
"Until Minneapolis, I would have told you that as bad as Trump is, he’s not capable of ordering ICE agents to shoot people…at random, and that as bad as ICE is, they’d refuse such orders. Now I no longer believe either of those things."Read @mjtoma.bsky.social:newrepublic.com/post/205379/…
…anyway…probably no bad thing to remind ourselves that the ratio of these shit-for-brains dead weights on the human race’s communal sisyphus routine to decent people is up there with the numbers on board with the cold wet way to get run out of town to the crowd that came to play with squirt guns in the face of full-frontal fascism-fan-service?
Read this if you want to feel really good about the bravery and decency of regular Americansslate.com/news-and-pol…
…that would be the lady who got a “please attend your induction to ICE” notification from the “never said I wanted to” version of an application…&…that accompanying remark probably doesn’t hold if you go dipping into her replies/mentions since that piece came out…just…sayin’
When Democrats folded in the last government shutdown—rescuing the GOP majority from itself and helping them pass a budget, giving validation to the Trump administration’s lawbreaking—the savvy politics knowers explained that folding was clearly worth it because it got the Epstein Files released.
Do we need to say it louder? Here. Louder." Federal courts in Alabama are using a law last applied during the U.S. internment [incarceration] of people of Japanese descent during World War II to charge immigrants who don’t register themselves…"www.al.com/news/2026/01…
…one of these things is not like the other…but…also it is…just…in different ways…that are about how they’re the same ways in other ways…but this way it counts in ways that mean it matters that the other ways don’t count so it can’t be stopped because the only ways that matter only work one way even though that way is somehow always the way the others don’t especially when they’re about the same thing
This site literally has a chemical weapon expert who explains to would-be protesters how to properly treat tear gas exposure, and hordes of morons call him a nazi because he debunks the home remedy they heard from their shitbird cousin whose whole personality is Dead Kennedys T-shirts.
this site seems to genuinely have an issue with viewing explanation as a form of endorsement
I'm sorry but calling me a turncoat is an absolutely ridiculous criticism in the context of a thread where I was calling the conclusions of the tribunal poorly reasoned and wrong in law, and uncritically adopting GC views.
Trying to attribute this position to me and GLP I find frankly outrageous when I have spent the last 9 months contesting this view, leading our legal case against it, and even publishing academic articles about why it is a violation of trans people's human rights to treat them as a third sex.
Me outlining the conclusions the tribunal reached is not me endorsing them. Especially when I emphasised repeatedly that this is a first instance decision and non-binding. I'm really not sure what more I can do to make my position on this clear – it has quite literally been my entire life since FWS.
it’s relentless and it’s a sign of profound self-infantilization.
I did several explanation attempts on how the money withheld from your paycheck in federal withholdings actually moves, and how "the states" have literally no ability to impact this, and so many people got mad at me for this.
part of why is: it’s embarrassing to admit you were wrong to spin-out on main.
half the userbase of this website is addicted to the dopamine hit that comes with "all is loss" bad news. they want to spiral out and resent you when you tell them something tethered to reality.
posted a video on the “canceled election” stuff on my youtube and it is unbelievable how many people on the ostensible left believe that trump is an all-powerful god king whose words shape reality. “buh buh but what if he says the election is fraud?” okay. he says the election is fraud. and?
people are spinning out scenarios that they can imagine seeng in movies and then asserting that trump will absolutely accomplish this because, as you know, he holds the infinity stones
…&…if I don’t run out of time or otherwise get distracted…I’mma try to find the one that seemed to be the root of people throwing around the terms “isposting” & “oughtposting”…because…that stuff that jamelle is at least some value of right about…is also not unlike the people explaining in advance of jan6th all the bullshit spun out like it was an actual theory by eastman or whoever to do the one-weird-compound-use-the-rules-to-break-the-game-trick that only works if the ones enforcing the rules…don’t…thing…from the D&D analogy…& without a whole lot of that making it so people could follow the crazy without getting lost to it thanks to a guide with perspective & a moral compass…how clear it was that balls were dropped in the run up to the thing without which it wouldn’t likely have been a thing…& what the ones he meant “don’t want to hurt me” about when he wanted them let through the metal detectors they were avoiding to fill out the void in his close up where he wanted his clamoring crowd…were about…with their buddies posted up over the potomac in a hotel suite they thought of as a FOB or some shit…from which to quick-reaction-force a bunch of arms over to the teams that were going to surf that crowd all the way to securing the capitol for their captain, thy captain…it…has its place…& in a more ideal world it would be known as the place where we find stuff that helps us choose to go a different way & not let it happen *before* we take seriously the idea that some people might have strayed so far from the business of serious people as to actually be trying to do that shit on purpose because they think it holds together
Trump just placed a tariff on most of the EU of 10% that will increase to 25% in June unless they agree to sell him Greenland.
This is mad king shit.
This is quickly approaching nazi Germany annexing Austria territory. At a certain point, Europe will need to stand up and push back or we will end up in a major war.
…& it’s hard not to think that it is a not insignificant hurdle to try to argue that it’s rational to proceed as though things will proceed rationally in the face of a world where so much pivots on a man spiraling into irrationality faster than he can lie about it…which already stopped being too slowly for the sentence he started to be the one he finishes…which is…for…reasons…treated as though he has said both nothing & everything until we’re all living in schrödinger’s box of “are we dead today?”
When I lecture to students about how the apparently thriving economy of the 1920s was really a house of cards just waiting to be knocked down, one of the points I stress is how much a small number of the very rich were essentially propping up consumer spending in unsustainable ways
…& how much of the answer depends on how huge numbers of people who are…relative to the availability of the information that might do so…staggeringly immune to the concept of being informed…feel…about how the world is serving their needs…when it comes to providing them with good things & demanding of them nothing that requires effort or cost commensurate with the respect & praise they think they deserve for simply gracing the rest of us with their glorious existence
you can save yourself so much grief when seeing a bad take by checking to see how many people the bad taker follows and if it's in the thousands and near to or more than the number of people following them you can just leave it be
…there’s a thing that calls itself a “labeller” (there’s loads but I just mean one in particular) on bluesky that classifies some accounts that would fit that description as “follow farming”…&…I’m not entirely certain…but I think at one point we used to call something pretty similar astroturfing…& I’m not sure that the old term wasn’t more useful than the new one?
AI is part of what’s killing adobe but not in this sense. You can’t open Acrobat without it bugging you to use its AI. You can’t toggle it off. Everybody hates that shit. Nobody wants it. This will be the fate of every company trying to force AI
From Dare Obasanjo on Mastodon. Adobe is hitting the floor. #AI
…as luck would have it time’s wingéd chariot is about to scythe through my chances of keeping this running…so…we don’t have to find out what kind of weird ways that could have wound up winding off down
Metrosexual is literally Ancient Greek for "mother-sexual". Ergo, Oedipus was the first ever metrosexual in history.
wrote about the occupation in minnesota with a closing note on how the white house has exactly one tactic — repression with goons — but no particular strategy for dealing with entrenched resistance. gift link.
…how a thing works is…different…depending on how you use it…if you use it…if it doesn’t let you avoid it…but…you can be anywhere across that spread & still not understand what it is or how it works…sometimes particularly if you…well…*are* the thing?
It’s consistently been one of the Bluesky’s biggest problems because one of its strengths is the presence of a ton of domain experts who are willing to explain things and one of its biggest weaknesses is the presence of a horde of reply guys who insist on interpreting those explanations as support
so, Mike, you’re saying this is just okay? we should all just put up with it?
…anyway…it’s…nice to be able to converse with grown ups…so…even if this doesn’t feel like a conversation to some of you…& we don’t hear from some folks as often as I’d prefer to…if any of you are remotely onboard the idea it might be nice if I didn’t entirely abandon sanity for the inviting waters of the sea of madness…probably worth noting that I am grateful for the part where at least to me that’s what it feels like I get to do here…because…some days…I do declare?
I have a theory that the general epistemic crisis has led to a lot of very online people getting used to communicating primarily through oughtposting and kind of forgetting how to deal with isposting
You encounter a purported fact but you also know there are lots of people with brain worms out there, so you’re not sure right away if the purported fact is something you want to add to your worldview or if it’s just nonsense that ended up fact-scented after percolating through an enwormed brain.
Every time I see this man, I wish all the more ardently that we were subject to the jurisdiction of the ICC. I have never shipped a man harder with The Hague.
*all the leftists predicting this exact thing and getting screamed at by liberals for Hating America
Nick Miroff: After 9/11, George W. Bush created the Department of Homeland Security to prevent future terror strikes. Now DHS shifted from defending the country against foreign terrorists to deploying agents on American streets for the purpose of terrorizing American citizens.
some may say this is a problem. they may say that getting assaulted by a horde of morons for making informed observations will drive away working professionals and subject experts. i say it's a unique aspect of this site's culture and we should protect it like a unesco heritage site
neolithic guys get pissed if you tell them their cultures are organized by the type of pots and jewelry they made. "we called ourselves the blood hunters" "we conquered villages far beyond this horizon" sorry bud you're the western linear pottery culture now
Had an intriguing editorial discussion recently: how did people in the past talk about 'minutes' when they didn't have watches or standardised times? How does that affect your thinking?Come down an Elizabethan/Jacobean rabbit hole with me. 1/
We’ve fought fascism and oligarchy before, and it’s so boring to have to do it again when our primary focus should be on addressing climate change. But the fascists and oligarchs are exacerbating climate change and hindering our efforts to combat it, so fight them we will.
This is partly because an entire generation of Americans in the 90s and 00s were told by media and political elites that a bunch of things would never happen that then started happening after 2015
…anyway…there’s some overlap in the things some ladies it strikes me sensible people might consider to be sensible both of & about a fair bit…but…to limit it to just two & with the understanding that some of it still overlaps between one of these & another
…the other lady had things to say that day, too
…&…they cover a lot of ground…& sometimes make one another laugh…&…I…will take a fair bit of that sort of thing over what seems to be the overwhelming alternative?
…still & all…you kinda know when you looking at a real one?
you know this guy is a FOR REAL photographer because he's telling the story of his brutal, unconditional arrest by federal goons and can't help but slip in a gear review
…oh…not sure if I dropped the ball on this on thursday or if it wouldn’t quite have hit play in time for that…but…just in case @farscythe hadn’t had it flung forth from the mists of youtube?
…anyway…flip-sides…catching…so on & so forth?
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Fuck Adobe. I have no sympathy for those greedy ass motherfuckers who basically pushed the subscription based model on all of us.
…I forget if I threw it in another of these before but not so long ago someone from salesforce said that part out loud, too…& if copilot can’t get traction within Office365…& Adobe can’t drive uptake with its captured market when that’s put up with what it has to be still self-selecting that way…&…salesforce hasn’t found a way to AI-automate some sub-set of workflows of integrations to a point that achieves uptake across the wildly wide selection of business models it’s got people to weave it into
…just maybe…the customers might be right about a thing or two?
The amazing thing was it took… 20 years for a GOPer to figure it out. Bunch of stupid arrogant dumb fuckwits.
Yes I am a cynical shit, but I call it how I see it. The funny part is that Cons get off on calling lefties pollyannas (always look on the bright side of life types) but I’ve noticed that it is mostly projection with these motherfuckers. When I point out things that could go wrong, I’m not doing it to poke holes in your glorious plans Von Dorkwitz… I’m trying to show where it can go horribly wrong and that you’d better plan on doing something about it because if a low level dumbshit like me can see it than our “enemies” or “competition” can too.
On a mildly entertainment note, I enjoyed the first season of the Punisher (Netflix) but one of the things that bothered me was having to side with DHS. I get that DHS is supposed to be protecting the internal security of the Murrica and that there are good people (assumption) in there doing a professional job of it, but it also wasn’t hard to believe that it was corrupt and incompetent especially how quickly and easily Billy blew away all those DHS agents in his escape from being arrested.
…I don’t have it to hand but I’ve seen at least one person mention that it’s about time someone who knows their way around that character put together an arc where he goes hard against ICE
…I was never a big fan of the punisher stuff…it was kind of trying to make some points that didn’t fit well with the framework the branding required it to form a part of & it seldom got much in the way of deftness in its handling…here & there, though…there’s enough of that you could stitch together a completely in-character storyline that would be like the punisher does shogun assassin but where ICE plays the part of the dwindling ninja clan trying to end the one guy walking the knife’s edge path to enlightenment…& trying to have a kid not be an orphan with the most complex PTSD ever documented…but…the punisher didn’t have one of those of his own last I checked in on that
…whereas…who & what the people trying to make that skull “their” skull the way the one on the chest of the man in maine was…you know…”their” one…are?
…frank castle more or less lives & breathes to have those kinds of people do neither…painfully if possible
…at least if they’d fixated on…lobo…it might make sorta-sense…can “recover” from near annihilation like an uber-destructive weed with homicidal mania…only surviving member of an entire species because he murdered all the others…thinks he’s not just a good guy but “the main man”…to people who don’t get starship troopers…or think homelander is the hero…you’d think he’d be a better fit all round, really
…I mean…they’d…be just as wrong…but…born in the usa…fortunate son…missing that point is kinda their go-to move…they’d end up wishing they only had to deal with frank?
…hmmm…if you did the crossover/team-up thing like all the movies…but…like…the defenders not the avengers…frank, lobo, luke cage, ghostrider, jessica jones, misty knight…maybe…deadpool…kill a buncha ICE-analogue gore-fodder for splash-page after splash-page
…might “do numbers”…& those publishers aren’t known for leaving money on the table…so…who knows?
…not to get unduly facetious…or flippant…but…we’re dealing with numpties…so…it might be unfair to hold them to an impossible standard of probity…or sense-making…or…legality or constitutionality or what-have-you…so…here’s a fun exercise for a “slow-news” sunday…see how many points they’d get docked if you scored them against criteria that haven’t been updated in nearly 30 years…were intended for comedic purposes…& only compile into a baseline standard for not being a joke of a *fictional* antagonist?
I was so happy to see the Courtney Milan tweet!
She’s a fantastic romance author and was a key person in bringing down the Romance Writers of America (RWA) org. To be clear, it was because they were being racist, then when she pointed it out, they doubled down on being racist and tried to gaslight her and others, and then she and others were like assholes, we got receipts. This started in around 2019? Org went to shit and basically collapsed within a few years.
Anyways, the implosion of the RWA is a really fascinating microcosm into *white lady progressive limits* in our society. Because the RWA had some really good stances on other social issues. About a decade before this, there was a push for whether or not a romance needed to be defined as 1 man + 1 woman, you know, because the gays! the gays!
And the pushback to that was intense! Authors like Nora Roberts were like hey this is bigotry and censorship. Authors who wrote paranormal romance were like ok cool so I can’t write 1 vampire + 1 woman then??? Because that’s not your formula? And the pushback worked and they shut the fuck up about it.
But being all “hey don’t be so racist?” yeah, that was a bridge too far for the white ladies.
Because this was a DRAMA moment in Romancelandia, let me summarize. Milan worked on the Board of Ethics for years for the RWA. She helped them add more policies to support diverse and inclusive authors. All of this, had they stuck with it, would have made their trade org much stronger in the shitstorm of online publishing we have now. But nooooo, they had to be douchebags.
Courtney Milan rightfully called out a book for being racist, then the author filed a ethics complaint against her for cyberbullying, then the RWA banned Milan for life, then basically their most intelligent (and popular/moneymaking) authors resigned from boards in protest of that decision, and they were left with an echo chamber of less qualified people to run things. Shocking how that happens?
And if you’re wondering how bad it was???? This book was up for being reissued, so it’s not like she randomly picked a 20 yr old book to talk about.
Milan posted screenshots from Somewhere Lies the Moon, a romance novel originally published in 1999, and explained why she thought it was a “fucking racist mess”. She noted that she had not read the entire book. One passage in the novel, Milan wrote in her original thread, suggested that no one had noticed the half-Chinese heroine’s blue eyes because “they never saw her eyes in China because she was always looking down”.
“What is this. How did Chinese women not bump into things. How did Chinese women read. Where did she get an education if she couldn’t like, look at anything,” Milan wrote.
In another passage, Milan wrote, characters were described as having “slanted almond eyes” and faces that were “almost yellow.”
“As a half-Chinese person,” she wrote, “seriously fuck this.”
That whole thing is so weird. And a similar controversy erupted among science fiction writers, because the old white men claimed their work was being marginalized in favor of LBGTQ+ and other minority writers. They got schooled with a quickness, and now most of the agitators are gone.
The thing is, there’s probably not a purer form of capitalism than literature. People will buy what they like, period. You don’t need to set parameters on anything. If you’re a talented writer, you’ll find your audience.
A few years earlier, they awarded romance of the year for an inspirational romance (Christian, no sex at all, probably not anything beyond hand holding) to a book about a Jewish woman in a concentration camp falling in love with a German soldier.
So you know, they made some heinous decisions for years that finally caught up to them.
I agree with Tomasky at The New Republic that we are very close to ICE opening fire on a crowd. If that happens, I suspect the life expectancy of the average ICE agent is going to decline rapidly. There’s only a handful of them. Once they start taking small arms fire from every rooftop and alleyway, there’s going to be a LOT less. You can’t “pacify” a vastly larger number of people who are quite well-armed. Pretty much every war in the Mideast proves that.
…I didn’t have time to check this morning but it’s been low-key bugging me all day…or…since whenever it was I first caught that part of this proclamatory eejit ejecta obita dicta bit of dictatorial a-logical involutionary backfilled psuedo-reasoning…but…metes & bounds?
…the “very brilliant, but highly complex system” that is his golden dome…the super modern super “knock stuff out of the sky with rockets” thing that means it’s imperative to “ACQUIRE” greenland…on account of the unconscionable threat posed by US allies convening in a place until he came along they would have totally invited US representatives…& indeed if the dome thing wasn’t basically more bullshit than star wars was in ronnie’s day…they wouldn’t even have said no if they wanted to set a bunch of that shit up…I mean…greenland might not have loved that part but aside from denmark that probably wouldn’t have factored in to the diplomatic response from the others if it had come up that way instead…anyway…part of what this sophisticated cutting edge thing relies upon for maximal potency or whatever is apparently a matter of angles…which…trajectories are angles…& there are lots of those in plotting vectors for intersecting planes or ballistic arcs or whatever…so…ok…presumably that’s the ballpark this part leads off with…& after the “because of” & before he closes out the subordinate clause to get back to how this part is why he can’t take no for an answer about the whole landmass getting conveyance-d into his name or whatever…the only other part is “metes & bounds”…so…about those
Metes and bounds is a system or method of describing land, real property (in contrast to personal property) or real estate.[1] The system has been used in England for many centuries and is still used there in the definition of general boundaries. The system is also used in the Canadian province of Ontario,[2] and throughout Canada for the description of electoral districts. By custom, it was applied in the original Thirteen Colonies that became the United States and in many other land jurisdictions based on Englishcommon law, including Zimbabwe, South Africa, India and Bangladesh.[3] While still in hand-me-down use, this system has been largely overtaken in the past few centuries by newer systems such as rectangular (government survey) and lot and block (recorded plat).
Typically the system uses physical features of the local geography, along with directions and distances, to define and describe the boundaries of a parcel of land. The boundaries are described in a running prose style, working around the parcel in sequence, from a point of beginning, returning to the same point, comparable with the oral ritual of beating the bounds. It may include references to other adjoining parcels (and their owners), and it, in turn, could also be referred to in later surveys. At the time the description is compiled, it may have been marked on the ground with permanent monuments placed where there were no suitable natural monuments.
– Metes refers to a boundary defined by the measurement of each straight run, specified by a distance between the terminal points, and an orientation or direction. A direction may be a simple compass bearing or a precise orientation determined by accurate survey methods.
– Bounds (Abuttals and boundaries) refer to a more general boundary description, such as along a certain watercourse, a stone wall, an adjoining public road way, or an existing building. The system is often used to define larger pieces of property (e.g. farms) and political subdivisions (e.g. town boundaries) where precise definition is not required or would be far too expensive, or previously designated boundaries can be incorporated into the description. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metes_and_bounds
…&…best & final offer…*maybe*…it isn’t that whatever dipshit most recently refreshed his memory on why he cares about greenland was the sort to pull that verbiage for the sake of the 13 colonies connection…rather than ockham’s call on the play being the real estate thing is the only kind of jargon he knows how to play “I know what that means because I know more than you about this stuff” with…but…on the side of the dipshit trying for extra credit giving that one the leg-up to still be in his head right by “we gotta, see – on account of the angles”…is if you wouldn’t grasp the difference between a point of origin & a point of beginning…& someone tried to explain intersecting subdivisions of conical volumes of sub-orbital airspace & hypersonic flight-times to interception to you when you were thinking about your latest shadier-than-shit “real estate” venture & it got garbled on the way out…if that dipshit *did* at some other point say “metes & bounds”…well…it…along with just an unfeasible litany of cursed stuff…wouldn’t be as utterly lacking in discernible excuses for forming part of reality in defiance of all fucking reason
…&…for whatever reason…that one…niggled me…oh…probably getting on for around as much as this makes it seem like it made me for real deranged?
It’s not impossible to shoot down fast moving things. The problem is that you need a lot more anti-missile missiles to stop them as the target goes faster.
…there’s also no flight-path/trajectory/notification-to-negation calculation matrix that has some mechanical must-have you can’t have unless he gets given greenland to take home with his nuclear football
…but…if there were…it…wouldn’t take its markers in metes & bounds…gah…not gah at you…but…I nearly added this part the first time
Election constituency boundaries continue to be described by the use of metes and bounds, even in jurisdictions where land plats are not otherwise based upon metes and bounds. Such mapping generally uses streets and their intersections to define the boundaries of election districts, wards, precincts, inter alia. E.g.: “From the intersection of Main Street and John Doe Boulevard, thence north to ABC Drive, thence generally east along the median of ABC Drive to 123rd Street, thence…”
…on the one hand…that’s another reason he’d maybe still have that one firing its little synapse for attention…or maybe it was the azimuth thing…or…hell…let’s not speculate about whether there’s chains & poles to get mixed up with your polar regions…that sounds…uncomfortable for everyone?
In many deeds, the direction is described not by azimuth (a clockwise degree measure out of 360 degrees) but instead by bearing (a direction north or south followed by a degree measure out of 90 degrees and another direction west or east). For example, such a bearing might be listed as “N 42°35′ W”, which means that the bearing is 42°35′ counterclockwise, or west of north. This has the advantage of providing the same degree measure regardless of which direction a particular boundary is being followed; the boundary can be traversed in the opposite direction simply by exchanging N for S and E for W. In other words, “N 42°35′ W” describes the same boundary as “S 42°35′ E” but is traversed in the opposite direction.
In most distance measures, especially those in older deeds and where measuring distances over a furlong, boundary lengths are listed in rods or poles instead of feet or meters. Rods and poles are equivalent measures equaling 16.5 feet. There are four rods in one chain. English surveyors carried chains (such as a Gunter’s chain) with which to measure lengths, as well as poles, and many older legal descriptions of real estate in the United States are given in chains and poles.
i kinda figure…that instead of throwing billions at figuring out this whole thing and making it work.. the more cost effective route to safety for the us of a…is not making everyone want to lob missiles at yous?
you’ve already got enough of a military that nobodys going to fuck with you on your own continent… all you need to do is play nice
sides….if you actually figure out a way to get out of mad…thats really going to fuck up this whole world peace thing… itll be the arms race all over again
…between you & me…that’s the part that makes me mention “the zap gun” every so often…it’s one of philip k dick’s longer ones in that it’s a book not a short story but it’s not a long book particularly
…basically…it’s a bit like what-if dr strangelove but different ending…so…no MAD…but due to MAD-based deterrence research into [thing that could seize the strategic initiative] replaces the arms race so all the other parts of the economic engine part of the military keep ticking & it doesn’t all get radically cost cut now it comes down to “you can’t or we’ll end you for trying”…more or less…but…more philip k dick…ish…so…the zap gun is like the platonic ideal of the ultimate weapon…but the bleeding edge of research is so theoretical the threat is that one side thinks it has reason to believe the other side is researching the zap gun so it must be feasible so they have to research it but neither have any actual plans & both try to espionage the plans they’re freaking out about the other one having while everyone gets more certain someone will be able to build the thing nobody understands how anyone would even start building
…well…long time since I read it all the way through…might be more to it than that & some of the details might differ some…but…the fact that book makes more sense than the fucking golden dome ought to be enough to make it embarrassing that he talks about that like he thinks it could do the thing he says it would be for?
i mean…half the reason the us military is what it is…is coz they built the weaponry to counter russias claimed capacity..
turns out russia was lying…..
but you know…id say the premise of the book is solid…seems like thats exactly how it works
We can blame some that on the neocons too because the US Navy didn’t believe the CIA numbers and capabilities so they hired a bunch of analysts known as Team B. Several of them became infamous for the invasion of Iraq (which they completely fucked up too).
Team B claimed the USSR’s navy was uber scary and exaggerated the capabilities of the Soviet navy and under recognized the capabilities of the US and NATO navies leading to the USN’s so called 600 ship navy (even in it’s peak strength of WW2, the USN never had 600 active warships) which nearly bankrupted the US.
Turns out Team B was a bunch of fucking idiots and the CIA was actually right for once.
Fuck Adobe. I have no sympathy for those greedy ass motherfuckers who basically pushed the subscription based model on all of us.
Burn Adobe burn.
…I forget if I threw it in another of these before but not so long ago someone from salesforce said that part out loud, too…& if copilot can’t get traction within Office365…& Adobe can’t drive uptake with its captured market when that’s put up with what it has to be still self-selecting that way…&…salesforce hasn’t found a way to AI-automate some sub-set of workflows of integrations to a point that achieves uptake across the wildly wide selection of business models it’s got people to weave it into
…just maybe…the customers might be right about a thing or two?
And their products are still too expensive for all that they’re becoming low value.
As for DHS… DUH.
The amazing thing was it took… 20 years for a GOPer to figure it out. Bunch of stupid arrogant dumb fuckwits.
Yes I am a cynical shit, but I call it how I see it. The funny part is that Cons get off on calling lefties pollyannas (always look on the bright side of life types) but I’ve noticed that it is mostly projection with these motherfuckers. When I point out things that could go wrong, I’m not doing it to poke holes in your glorious plans Von Dorkwitz… I’m trying to show where it can go horribly wrong and that you’d better plan on doing something about it because if a low level dumbshit like me can see it than our “enemies” or “competition” can too.
On a mildly entertainment note, I enjoyed the first season of the Punisher (Netflix) but one of the things that bothered me was having to side with DHS. I get that DHS is supposed to be protecting the internal security of the Murrica and that there are good people (assumption) in there doing a professional job of it, but it also wasn’t hard to believe that it was corrupt and incompetent especially how quickly and easily Billy blew away all those DHS agents in his escape from being arrested.
…I don’t have it to hand but I’ve seen at least one person mention that it’s about time someone who knows their way around that character put together an arc where he goes hard against ICE
…I was never a big fan of the punisher stuff…it was kind of trying to make some points that didn’t fit well with the framework the branding required it to form a part of & it seldom got much in the way of deftness in its handling…here & there, though…there’s enough of that you could stitch together a completely in-character storyline that would be like the punisher does shogun assassin but where ICE plays the part of the dwindling ninja clan trying to end the one guy walking the knife’s edge path to enlightenment…& trying to have a kid not be an orphan with the most complex PTSD ever documented…but…the punisher didn’t have one of those of his own last I checked in on that
…whereas…who & what the people trying to make that skull “their” skull the way the one on the chest of the man in maine was…you know…”their” one…are?
…frank castle more or less lives & breathes to have those kinds of people do neither…painfully if possible
…at least if they’d fixated on…lobo…it might make sorta-sense…can “recover” from near annihilation like an uber-destructive weed with homicidal mania…only surviving member of an entire species because he murdered all the others…thinks he’s not just a good guy but “the main man”…to people who don’t get starship troopers…or think homelander is the hero…you’d think he’d be a better fit all round, really
…I mean…they’d…be just as wrong…but…born in the usa…fortunate son…missing that point is kinda their go-to move…they’d end up wishing they only had to deal with frank?
…hmmm…if you did the crossover/team-up thing like all the movies…but…like…the defenders not the avengers…frank, lobo, luke cage, ghostrider, jessica jones, misty knight…maybe…deadpool…kill a buncha ICE-analogue gore-fodder for splash-page after splash-page
…might “do numbers”…& those publishers aren’t known for leaving money on the table…so…who knows?
…not to get unduly facetious…or flippant…but…we’re dealing with numpties…so…it might be unfair to hold them to an impossible standard of probity…or sense-making…or…legality or constitutionality or what-have-you…so…here’s a fun exercise for a “slow-news” sunday…see how many points they’d get docked if you scored them against criteria that haven’t been updated in nearly 30 years…were intended for comedic purposes…& only compile into a baseline standard for not being a joke of a *fictional* antagonist?
http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
…even if it’s come to get extended
http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/dungeon_a.html
…still a few short of hitting that ominous 300, at least
http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/dungeon_b.html
…&…some fuckups from that tale that might not be represented on that checklist…so…be nice to have a bit more “merry” in this merry-go-round?
I remember that. All good points, but I’d like to think I’m more than a 5 year old… /s
I was so happy to see the Courtney Milan tweet!
She’s a fantastic romance author and was a key person in bringing down the Romance Writers of America (RWA) org. To be clear, it was because they were being racist, then when she pointed it out, they doubled down on being racist and tried to gaslight her and others, and then she and others were like assholes, we got receipts. This started in around 2019? Org went to shit and basically collapsed within a few years.
Anyways, the implosion of the RWA is a really fascinating microcosm into *white lady progressive limits* in our society. Because the RWA had some really good stances on other social issues. About a decade before this, there was a push for whether or not a romance needed to be defined as 1 man + 1 woman, you know, because the gays! the gays!
And the pushback to that was intense! Authors like Nora Roberts were like hey this is bigotry and censorship. Authors who wrote paranormal romance were like ok cool so I can’t write 1 vampire + 1 woman then??? Because that’s not your formula? And the pushback worked and they shut the fuck up about it.
But being all “hey don’t be so racist?” yeah, that was a bridge too far for the white ladies.
Because this was a DRAMA moment in Romancelandia, let me summarize. Milan worked on the Board of Ethics for years for the RWA. She helped them add more policies to support diverse and inclusive authors. All of this, had they stuck with it, would have made their trade org much stronger in the shitstorm of online publishing we have now. But nooooo, they had to be douchebags.
Courtney Milan rightfully called out a book for being racist, then the author filed a ethics complaint against her for cyberbullying, then the RWA banned Milan for life, then basically their most intelligent (and popular/moneymaking) authors resigned from boards in protest of that decision, and they were left with an echo chamber of less qualified people to run things. Shocking how that happens?
And if you’re wondering how bad it was???? This book was up for being reissued, so it’s not like she randomly picked a 20 yr old book to talk about.
source – https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/31/romance-novel-industry-uproar-discipline-author-racist-courtney-milan
That whole thing is so weird. And a similar controversy erupted among science fiction writers, because the old white men claimed their work was being marginalized in favor of LBGTQ+ and other minority writers. They got schooled with a quickness, and now most of the agitators are gone.
The thing is, there’s probably not a purer form of capitalism than literature. People will buy what they like, period. You don’t need to set parameters on anything. If you’re a talented writer, you’ll find your audience.
Fucking Gamergate was the birth of all this pushback. And the SF the wingnuts wrote was fucking terrible, too.
Wow… that’s pretty damn racist.
A few years earlier, they awarded romance of the year for an inspirational romance (Christian, no sex at all, probably not anything beyond hand holding) to a book about a Jewish woman in a concentration camp falling in love with a German soldier.
So you know, they made some heinous decisions for years that finally caught up to them.
Also, Courtney was one of the leads on outing Federal judge Kozinski as a predator & pest;
https://abovethelaw.com/2017/12/judge-kozinski-accused-of-sexual-misconduct/
https://abovethelaw.com/2020/01/judge-kozinski-accuser-faces-new-fight-with-romance-writers-of-america/
https://www.courtneymilan.com/metoo/kozinski.html
And getting that a-hole to “retire” from the bench, when iirc it was discovered he was STILL harassing young women.
I agree with Tomasky at The New Republic that we are very close to ICE opening fire on a crowd. If that happens, I suspect the life expectancy of the average ICE agent is going to decline rapidly. There’s only a handful of them. Once they start taking small arms fire from every rooftop and alleyway, there’s going to be a LOT less. You can’t “pacify” a vastly larger number of people who are quite well-armed. Pretty much every war in the Mideast proves that.
Speaking of which, an Episcopal Bishop in NH is telling his priests they need to get ready to take it to the streets and prepare to die protecting others.
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/18/nx-s1-5678579/ice-clashes-new-hampshire-bishop-urges-clergy-prepare-wills
I want to look away. I’m forcing myself not to look away.
It’s hard.
Seems like a good time for grunge to make a comeback…
…I didn’t have time to check this morning but it’s been low-key bugging me all day…or…since whenever it was I first caught that part of this proclamatory eejit ejecta obita dicta bit of dictatorial a-logical involutionary backfilled psuedo-reasoning…but…metes & bounds?
…the “very brilliant, but highly complex system” that is his golden dome…the super modern super “knock stuff out of the sky with rockets” thing that means it’s imperative to “ACQUIRE” greenland…on account of the unconscionable threat posed by US allies convening in a place until he came along they would have totally invited US representatives…& indeed if the dome thing wasn’t basically more bullshit than star wars was in ronnie’s day…they wouldn’t even have said no if they wanted to set a bunch of that shit up…I mean…greenland might not have loved that part but aside from denmark that probably wouldn’t have factored in to the diplomatic response from the others if it had come up that way instead…anyway…part of what this sophisticated cutting edge thing relies upon for maximal potency or whatever is apparently a matter of angles…which…trajectories are angles…& there are lots of those in plotting vectors for intersecting planes or ballistic arcs or whatever…so…ok…presumably that’s the ballpark this part leads off with…& after the “because of” & before he closes out the subordinate clause to get back to how this part is why he can’t take no for an answer about the whole landmass getting conveyance-d into his name or whatever…the only other part is “metes & bounds”…so…about those
…&…best & final offer…*maybe*…it isn’t that whatever dipshit most recently refreshed his memory on why he cares about greenland was the sort to pull that verbiage for the sake of the 13 colonies connection…rather than ockham’s call on the play being the real estate thing is the only kind of jargon he knows how to play “I know what that means because I know more than you about this stuff” with…but…on the side of the dipshit trying for extra credit giving that one the leg-up to still be in his head right by “we gotta, see – on account of the angles”…is if you wouldn’t grasp the difference between a point of origin & a point of beginning…& someone tried to explain intersecting subdivisions of conical volumes of sub-orbital airspace & hypersonic flight-times to interception to you when you were thinking about your latest shadier-than-shit “real estate” venture & it got garbled on the way out…if that dipshit *did* at some other point say “metes & bounds”…well…it…along with just an unfeasible litany of cursed stuff…wouldn’t be as utterly lacking in discernible excuses for forming part of reality in defiance of all fucking reason
…&…for whatever reason…that one…niggled me…oh…probably getting on for around as much as this makes it seem like it made me for real deranged?
It’s not impossible to shoot down fast moving things. The problem is that you need a lot more anti-missile missiles to stop them as the target goes faster.
…there’s also no flight-path/trajectory/notification-to-negation calculation matrix that has some mechanical must-have you can’t have unless he gets given greenland to take home with his nuclear football
…but…if there were…it…wouldn’t take its markers in metes & bounds…gah…not gah at you…but…I nearly added this part the first time
…on the one hand…that’s another reason he’d maybe still have that one firing its little synapse for attention…or maybe it was the azimuth thing…or…hell…let’s not speculate about whether there’s chains & poles to get mixed up with your polar regions…that sounds…uncomfortable for everyone?
i kinda figure…that instead of throwing billions at figuring out this whole thing and making it work.. the more cost effective route to safety for the us of a…is not making everyone want to lob missiles at yous?
you’ve already got enough of a military that nobodys going to fuck with you on your own continent… all you need to do is play nice
sides….if you actually figure out a way to get out of mad…thats really going to fuck up this whole world peace thing… itll be the arms race all over again
…between you & me…that’s the part that makes me mention “the zap gun” every so often…it’s one of philip k dick’s longer ones in that it’s a book not a short story but it’s not a long book particularly
…basically…it’s a bit like what-if dr strangelove but different ending…so…no MAD…but due to MAD-based deterrence research into [thing that could seize the strategic initiative] replaces the arms race so all the other parts of the economic engine part of the military keep ticking & it doesn’t all get radically cost cut now it comes down to “you can’t or we’ll end you for trying”…more or less…but…more philip k dick…ish…so…the zap gun is like the platonic ideal of the ultimate weapon…but the bleeding edge of research is so theoretical the threat is that one side thinks it has reason to believe the other side is researching the zap gun so it must be feasible so they have to research it but neither have any actual plans & both try to espionage the plans they’re freaking out about the other one having while everyone gets more certain someone will be able to build the thing nobody understands how anyone would even start building
…well…long time since I read it all the way through…might be more to it than that & some of the details might differ some…but…the fact that book makes more sense than the fucking golden dome ought to be enough to make it embarrassing that he talks about that like he thinks it could do the thing he says it would be for?
i mean…half the reason the us military is what it is…is coz they built the weaponry to counter russias claimed capacity..
turns out russia was lying…..
but you know…id say the premise of the book is solid…seems like thats exactly how it works
but yes the golden dome is a stupid idea…
We can blame some that on the neocons too because the US Navy didn’t believe the CIA numbers and capabilities so they hired a bunch of analysts known as Team B. Several of them became infamous for the invasion of Iraq (which they completely fucked up too).
Team B claimed the USSR’s navy was uber scary and exaggerated the capabilities of the Soviet navy and under recognized the capabilities of the US and NATO navies leading to the USN’s so called 600 ship navy (even in it’s peak strength of WW2, the USN never had 600 active warships) which nearly bankrupted the US.
Turns out Team B was a bunch of fucking idiots and the CIA was actually right for once.
and today i learnt something new
Source: “Fall From Glory: The Men Who Sank The US Navy”
Author Greg Vistica (now a media consultant for the important and self important, sigh…)
That Abernathy photo’s “inside angle” was INCREDIBLE, too–and i’m glad he was able to get the Leica to his friend & out of the scrum!
He was evidently shooting black & white on it, and the three photos together tell a WHOLE story!