Links and Notes for January 5th, 2024

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Economy & Finance
• Science & Nature
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Fun

Public Policy & Politics

Go Straight to Jail by Jack Norton, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, and Judah Schept (The Baffler)

“These numbers represent real people—hundreds of thousands of people who are directly impacted by the violence of jail incarceration and detention, millions of people who are affected by the extraction that jail facilitates, and by the violence that is perpetrated on families and communities through policing and incarceration across the varied geography of the United States.”

It’s state-sanctioned violence with the hope that it will lower the overall level of violence, not by in any way addressing the conditions that led to the violence being prevented, but by using negative consequences to reduce the likelihood of that person using violence as a solution to those original, continuing—and likely exacerbated by incarceration—problems. We may not have started it—it’s arguable that society is responsible to a large degree for the violence it not only contains, but can be seen to engender with its policies—but we are definitely participating. It’s a cycle of violence.

“While incarceration has always been wielded as a class-war project […]”

True. The rich don’t get arrested; they don’t go to jail. They get fined, at worst. Poor people lose their lives for mistakes or as exaggerated reactions to societal transgressions that have far less reach and impact than rich-people crimes. When a poor person robs an apartment, that’s one victim. When a rich person steals a company’s pension fund, that’s thousands of victims. If the poor person is caught, they lose their family, freedom, livelihood, future. If the rich person is caught, they sit out a pre-trial period at their luxurious home or homes, then plea-bargain for a fine and no admission of guilt. Of course they get to keep the money.

“[…] central lesson from those fights—that conditions of confinement and class action lawsuits and judicial approaches toward reducing overcrowding or addressing poor conditions can result in increases to carceral capacity—should caution anti-jail activists as they consider various tactics.”

“In other places, critics of incarceration who occupy powerful positions in universities, foundations, city governments, and nonprofit organizations, propose and design new facilities presumed to meet the needs of women and gender-expansive people, one of many examples of an emergent liberal/progressive counterinsurgency against abolitionist demands. In still other places, new jails are proposed as expressions of city commitments to racial justice.”

“People affected by jail—all people—should have access to education and treatment; institutions should absolutely be accessible for people with all kinds of disabilities and should absolutely be able to respond to and provide care for women, trans, and nonbinary people in ways that affirm their gender identities and needs. Carceral humanism, however, is primarily an appeal for greater carceral capacity; no one is safer inside a jail cell.”

“[…] the Louisiana state legislature innovated a new policy in 1976: a per diem system where the state department of corrections would allocate to sheriffs’ departments a certain amount of money per state prisoner held each night in a parish jail. This carceral arrangement was initially understood as a temporary stopgap while the state built new prisons. But sheriffs began to see this arrangement as beneficial insofar as per diem monies increased their economic and political resources, leading sheriffs to band together to organize against state prison building and for more state prisoners in their jails.”

“Not only are per diem payments on average much lower than the annual cost per day of incarcerating someone in a prison, it is even cheaper than taking out debt to finance new prison construction. And even when state legislatures create programs to aid sheriffs in expanding their jails for warehousing state prisoners, the debt does not impact the state’s bond rating as it is officially taken on by the county.”

“As John Irwin noted, the jail “was devised as, and continues to be, the special social device for controlling . . . the lowest class of people.””

U.S. Policy is Exacerbating Cuba’s Growing Humanitarian Crisis by William M. Leogrande (Scheer Post)

“Since 2022, 442,000 undocumented Cubans have arrived at US borders, more than 50,000 have come as legal immigrants, and tens of thousands more have emigrated elsewhere. Cuba is hemorrhaging its young, best-educated people. Migration is also a blow to the domestic economy. Last year, more than 12,000 doctors left. In Havana alone, there are 17,000 vacant teachers positions. Even Cubans earning good salaries working for foreign diplomatic missions and international organizations are leaving because they cannot envision a future for themselves in their homeland.”

“The humanitarian situation on the island cries out for a US response. Washington has offered Cuba humanitarian aid before. In 2008, in response to the devastation caused by Hurricane Gustav, George W. Bush’s administration offered Cuba $6.3 million of aid, $5 million directly to the Cuban government without preconditions. Just last year, the Biden administration provided $2 million in the wake of Hurricane Ian to help rebuild housing in the hardest hit communities.”

$2 million! My goodness. So much money. What will they do with all of that aid?

“President Biden could take four simple steps to help ease the crisis:”

Spoiler alert: Lifting the blockade is not on the list.

“There are moments, John F. Kennedy wrote in Profiles in Courage , when politicians must choose between doing what’s politically expedient and doing what’s right.”

F@$k JFK. He only looks less bad relative to the psychos he surrounded himself with. He was an elitist racist. I don’t care what sort of fine words he wrote or said. When he had the chance, he did none of it. He was an anticommunist, sociopath-level capitalist with a bad temper and a chip on his shoulder—just like all of the rest of them.

“Joe Biden is known for his genuine empathy for others. Right now, he is focused on the acute humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the interminable war in Ukraine. But if the responsible senior officials in the State Department and National Security Council put Cuba on the president’s agenda and briefed him on the depth of the crisis there, maybe he would do the right thing.”

This is so unmoored from reality that it’s barely comprehensible. Joe Biden is not “known for his genuine empathy” (writing “for others” is redundant); Joe Biden is a notorious asshole. He always has been. His sociopathy and mania are directly responsible for the Ukraine and Gaza nightmares. He is president of the United States. He chooses the people to run these policies.

He chose to continue forcing Russia into a corner—he completely ignored two proposals from Russia in 2021. He wanted the Ukraine war. His unquestioning support for Netanyahu is directly responsible for Israel’s boldness in its most-recent war. He just opened a new war against Yemen—yes, a war. What else do you call attacking another sovereign nation and killing its citizens with missiles?

He’s not inflicted with those situations—he created them. He likes it this way. He doesn’t give a shit about anything other than being reelected. He’s a nightmare. Don’t hold your breath until he helps Cuba, FFS. You’ve got to be kidding me.

I’m halfway through the bonus episodes for season 2 of the Blowback Podcast, which is called “Cuba Libre”. When you really learn how the U.S. has just shat on that country for almost 65 years, you can’t possibly have the absolutely stupid hope that Joe Biden—of all f@$king people—is going to do a goddamned good thing for that island. And JFK! Don’t even get me started on that guy.

ZAKA Is Not a Trustworthy Source for Allegations of Sexual Violence on October 7 by The Short String (Scheer Post)

“Among ZAKA’s lies, Haaretz listed a falsehood about the “bodies of twenty children with severed heads,” “piles of burned children,” and a “pregnant woman’s stomach ripped open, and her fetus stabbed.” It is hard to conceive of all these false testimonies as accidental “misinterpretations.””

The Behind the News, 1/4/24 podcast includes an excellent analysis of the skullduggery surrounding the Democrats seeking to prevent Trump from running for president instead of just convincing people to vote for a better candidate.

At 28:00,

“Samuel Moyn: I’m hoping we can avoid civil war in this country. But for that very reason, it seems to me, that preempting the need to convince our fellow citizens not to vote for Trump is an enormous mistake, especially if we want to avoid having to face them down, militarily. ”

To militarily, I would also add morally and democratically. You honestly can’t pretend to be trying to get elected democratically if you sweep candidates out of the way extra-democratically. You might as well just have Trump assassinated, at that point. You’re already a totalitarian—you might as well do it right. Even the Republicans never considered striking candidates from state ballots, but I’m sure they’re warm to the idea.

“Doug Henwood: That brings us to the political side of this. It looks to me—and this is putting it bluntly—that Democrats are unable to beat Trump politically—or are afraid that they can’t beat Trump politically—so they’re trying to beat him with what looks like legal trickery. And an awful lot of people are going to read it that way, because it seems to be correct.

“Samuel Moyn: I’m completely with you. And, as I’ve pointed out, this is a kind of dark side of the Trump era. That there’s endless talk about saving democracy but, actually, what motivates a lot of that rhetoric is fear of democracy. Fear that it actually allows Trump to win, and makes him more and more popular. It can’t be missed that we’re at a time when these legal hijinks are coinciding with Joe Biden cratering in the polls and Donald Trump going from strength to strength.

“There is an argument, obviously, that democracy requires rules. And there are legal exclusions, like 34-year-olds not being allowed to run for president, that have to be enforced, like other election law, to even have democratic processes. […] you look like you’re grasping at straws when you say ‘we’ve already agreed that Donald Trump can’t run’ when most of the country actually supports him. And what it really conceals is that you’re turning to […] tactics, out of weakness, when you fear your own ability to be strong and popular in the electoral contest that you claim to be defending.

“[…] My worry […] is that these tactics are just distractions from the absolute need to present a credible program to the millions of voters who are undecided or are supporting Trump because they don’t think Democrats are credible, not just when it comes to democracy, but when it comes to equality and justice.”

Commencement Address at American University, Washington, D.C. on June 10, 1963 (JFK Library)

“Second: Let us reexamine our attitude toward the Soviet Union. It is discouraging to think that their leaders may actually believe what their propagandists write. It is discouraging to read a recent authoritative Soviet text on Military Strategy and find, on page after page, wholly baseless and incredible claims–such as the allegation that ‘American imperialist circles are preparing to unleash different types of wars . . . that there is a very real threat of a preventive war being unleashed by American imperialists against the Soviet Union . . . [and that] the political aims of the American imperialists are to enslave economically and politically the European and other capitalist countries . . . [and] to achieve world domination . . . by means of aggressive wars.’”

This is all true. He knew it at the time. Also I’m sure that he said the first sentence without noting the irony at all.

“it is sad to read these Soviet statements–to realize the extent of the gulf between us. But it is also a warning–a warning to the American people not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.”

He didn’t follow his own advice. He’s just reading out loud. No-one since has listened either. He literally peppered this speech with statements that belie this one. Like the one about “find[ing] communism […] repugnant” below.

“No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue.”

Except Cuba—right, Jack?

American election officials are really quite advanced in their bullshit. Just spewing things that have nothing to do with reality. Clinton and Obama would really follow in this guy’s footsteps.

“As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity.”

This is such a shockingly ignorant and simple-minded thing to say—but people keep pointing me to this speech as indicative of JFK’s enlightened mindset.

“Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other.”

Again: so simplistic. He doesn’t consider anything other than trading blows on a field to be “war”. Demeaning the lives of thousands, possibly millions, just to exact petty revenges on the USSR was nothing to this man. He didn’t care about anything but projecting U.S. power. He never made a concession. None of was violence, none of it was war. What an asshole.

“For we are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combating ignorance, poverty, and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle in which suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counterweapons.”

But you and your country did this ten times more than the USSR. You knew how far ahead you were. You lied about it. The USSR were always losing, always behind—there was never a “gap” for the U.S. to fill. Kruschev said that military buildup is good for capitalism whereas it is harmful to socialism.

“We must, therefore, persevere in the search for peace in the hope that constructive changes within the Communist bloc might bring within reach solutions which now seem beyond us. We must conduct our affairs in such a way that it becomes in the Communists’ interest to agree on a genuine peace.”

They are the one that have to change, of course. The U.S. is so perfect that there is no room for improvement. All concessions and change and growth are for loser countries that haven’t yet achieved the enlightenment of the exceptional nation. It’s enough to make you want to throw up.

“To secure these ends, America’s weapons are nonprovocative, carefully controlled, designed to deter, and capable of selective use. Our military forces are committed to peace and disciplined in self-restraint. Our diplomats are instructed to avoid unnecessary irritants and purely rhetorical hostility.”

JFC JFK. This has never been the case. You’re high on your own supply.

“We are unwilling to impose our system on any unwilling people–but we are willing and able to engage in peaceful competition with any people on earth.”

Oh f@$k off. This is ridiculous. Going back to before I was born, U.S. presidents were all sociopathic, deluded liars, just utterly unaware of how hypocritical they were—because their prime axiom is always that U.S. Americans are better. Correction: Elite U.S. Americans are better. They deserve to have everything as their noble birthright. Letting anyone else have anything would be a waste because they’re all to benighted to appreciate it. They’re too stupid to make any use of things. Filthy communists. Filthy natives.

“The Communist drive to impose their political and economic system on others is the primary cause of world tension today. For there can be no doubt that, if all nations could refrain from interfering in the self-determination of others, the peace would be much more assured.”

Methinks he’s projecting quite a bit here. Jesus, do you even listen to yourself? Do you even bother to think for a second whether the behavior of the nation under your control exhibited the characteristics you seem to hold so dear? Or did it do literally the exact opposite at every opportunity? News flash, JFK: since you assassination, it has continued to do so—namely, not what you said you wanted. You never did it. And no-one since has, either. This has never been a priority. It’s just pretty shit to say when we want to tell the world how we demand it thinks of us. Judge us by our words, not our actions. Or else.

“The pursuit of disarmament has been an effort of this Government since the 1920's. It has been urgently sought by the past three administrations. And however dim the prospects may be today, we intend to continue this effort–to continue it in order that all countries, including our own, can better grasp what the problems and possibilities of disarmament are.”

You mean disarming everyone else, right? Because there was an armaments phase in the 1940s unlike the world has ever seen. The U.S. has never been about disarmament. I have no idea what he’s talking about. It’s pure fantasy.

“To make clear our good faith and solemn convictions on the matter, I now declare that the United States does not propose to conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other states do not do so. We will not be the first to resume. Such a declaration is no substitute for a formal binding treaty, but I hope it will help us achieve one. Nor would such a treaty be a substitute for disarmament, but I hope it will help us achieve it.”

This is great. Did we end up doing that, though? I’m seriously asking because I don’t know. Did we actually stop atmospheric testing?

Yup, we did. Two months later with the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (Wikipedia). Heartfelt congratulations to JFK and the team.

“While we proceed to safeguard our national interests, let us also safeguard human interests. And the elimination of war and arms is clearly in the interest of both. No treaty, however much it may be to the advantage of all, however tightly it may be worded, can provide absolute security against the risks of deception and evasion. But it can–if it is sufficiently effective in its enforcement and if it is sufficiently in the interests of its signers–offer far more security and far fewer risks than an unabated, uncontrolled, unpredictable arms race.”

This never happened, though. It’s hard to say whether it would have, had he not been assassinated. He talks pretty sometimes. So did Obama—who also did the opposite. I’ve learned enough history to know that Kennedy also did other than he said, especially when it counted.

“The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough–more than enough–of war and hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success. Confident and unafraid, we labor on–not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace.”

“The U.S. will never start a war.”, will only “be prepared if others wish it.” Yeah, sure. That’s not how it worked out. It’s just words. Pretty words, but the world already has enough evidence to know that it was lies.

Journalism & Media

Donald Trump, America’s Comic by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“Trump peppered the Poconos delivery with observations that blow your mind when you pause to consider it’s the former President of the United States saying these things. “The army tank is a beauty. They want to be environmentally friendly as we go in and blast the crap out of some nation,” he said, in another standard. “We’re going to go in, we’re going to be environmentally friendly as we blast that our way through their front lines, but we’re doing it in an environmentally friendly manner. How crazy are we?”

“Listening to this stuff is like watching a Pope throw open the Vatican door with his balls hanging out. The brain screams to laugh at the situation, but everyone pretends it’s not funny.”

You can’t blame Trump for any of the truly horrific stuff that happened to the U.S.

“In the fifteen years before the oft-mocked real estate magnate ran for president, the U.S. introduced torture, kidnapping, warrantless arrest (back for the first time since 1861), drone assassination, Minority Report-style predictive policing, preemptive war, mass surveillance, and a long, long list of other lunacies into our culture. These weren’t small changes, but sweeping rewrites of Schoolhouse Rock promises, things that as a citizen made you want to puke from shame.”

“America’s leaders had been peeing on every Amendment in the Bill of Rights for over a decade, even going back in time to disavow pre-American traditions like habeas corpus and grand jury secrecy. Just as the population was beginning to figure out how low we’d sunk, we were told the true outrage against “norms” came when the DNC’s own preferred candidate, Trump, got elected in the loudest record-scratch in history.”

“Through 2015 he was famous in a media circles mainly as the kind of person the educated set liked to make fun of, a “short-fingered vulgarian” who liked gold leaf, fake tits, and online steaks. If Barack Obama was the avatar of upper class probity, a lean multiracial scholar fawned over by the Nobel Committee, Trump was the opposite, an artery-clogged casino boss with bankruptcies and a comb-over.”

“His freestyle stump schtick about everything from exercise (“I promise I will never be in a bicycle race”) to NATO (“Obsolete. Big statement to make when you don’t know that much about it, but I learn quickly”) to Heidi Klum’s face (“No longer a 10”) provided such a violent contrast with the usual false dignity of establishment candidates that he was able, as I wrote eight years ago, to march right through the front door to the presidency.”

“Voters liked Trump because of the impolitic things he said, not in spite of them. His campaign slogan might as well have been, “A schmuck, but at least I admit it,” something lost on Democratic opponents who ran attack ads on the manufacture of Trump merch in China when the Clintons’ own embrace of NAFTA was the death knell for American domestic manufacturing.”

“The race was a referendum on which type of norms-ignorning liar Americans disliked more, and considering the unanimity of media on this question, Trump’s win was a massive repudiation of institutional America.”

“In order to avoid the shame of admitting that the mighty American system had been felled by an ad-libbing Diceman act with a Twitter account, Trump had to be transformed in media reports into more than just a barnstorming braggart with tortoise hide. He had to represent a grand, operatic evil to whom a loss could be pitched as somehow not the crushing embarrassment it was. The incredible propaganda line settled on was that Trump, maybe the most famously indiscreet celebrity America ever saw, had for decades been a Soviet sleeper agent, plotting to undermine the “rules-based international order” with vise-lipped co-conspirator Vladimir Putin.”

“He can be more or less angry or incoherent, he’ll say more or fewer things an Ivy League graduate would find objectionable, misogynistic, or obscene, but the constant from the start has been Trump’s dedication to not giving a fuck — there’s no other way to put it in English — and institutional America’s equally hard-headed determination to reward him by overreacting.”

Great essay. Absolutely up to form. Many, many great points in this essay. It’s a beautiful essay. Some people might say the most beautiful.

Matt Taibbi Visits Sioux Center Iowa's Commit to Caucus for Trump Rally by Racket News (YouTube)

Matt Taibbi’s on the campaign trail. He’s in Iowa, at a Trump rally. Man, watch Taibbi’s interviews with people in the parking lot. That could be anywhere in America. It could be Tennessee or CNY, for all I know. Biden’s doomed if he doesn’t figure out how to talk to these people. Funniest line: “Nikki Haley. She’s a globalist. She likes the globe.”

“She likes the globe.”

How does he make that sound detrimental?

Matt Taibbi and Aaron Maté on the Anniversary of January 6 by Useful Idiots Podcast (YouTube)

“Aaron: I maintain my disinterest in January 6th for the rest of my life.”

Good for you. Focus your energies on something useful, something that isn’t being blown up to be Joe Biden’s campaign lever. His entire campaign is going to be about Donald Trump trying to overthrow the country.

Because they have literally nothing else to offer, you’re going to hear “this election is going to be a referendum on our democracy” a million times from the Biden campaign and its mouth, the U.S. media (at least one silo of it).

Trump says Civil War ‘could have been negotiated.’ Historians disagree. by Marianne LeVine (Washington Post)

““The Civil War was so fascinating, so horrible,” Trump said. “So many mistakes were made. See, there was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you. I think you could have negotiated that. All the people died, so many people died. You know, that was the disaster.”

“Trump went on to describe the Civil War as “vicious” and suggested that “Abraham Lincoln, of course, if he negotiated it, you probably wouldn’t even know who Abraham Lincoln was.””

At least he stopped short of saying he could made have made the “deal” with no loss of life, but no-one asked him, so.

“At back-to-back campaign events Friday in Sioux Center and Mason City, Trump criticized former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley for not mentioning slavery at a recent campaign stop in New Hampshire, where she was asked about what the cause of the Civil War was. (Haley has since said that “of course the Civil War was about slavery.”)

““They asked her about the Civil War: Why did it start? How did it start? She didn’t use the word ‘slavery,’ which was interesting,” Trump told the crowd at an event in Mason City. “I don’t know that it’s going to have an impact, but I’d say slavery is sort of the obvious answer as opposed to about three paragraphs of bulls— she just talked. Nobody knew what she was saying.””

Goddamn, that’s funny. That’s is absolutely /r/MurderedByWords material right there.

“She loves the globe.”

The man is a one-man wrecking-ball for candidate bullshit. He’s just as full of it as everyone else—I mean, who gives a shit about Trump’s opinion on the U.S. Civil War?—but his superpower seems to be to gain power from other people’s stupidity. And he gets long write-ups in the Washington Post, analyzing every word that drips out of his maw in about 3½ hours of extemporaneous speech. His superpower is not caring.

Did he actually say it? There seems to be video (Twitter), but we’re deep into the era of deep-fake videos, so take it with a grain of salt. I think it’s real because it matches the video background and clothes from other videos I’ve seen, delivered by Racket News, who were actually there, on the ground.

In the podcast Episode 345: Naughty List (Patreon), Brace and Liz called Kevin Spacey a “child rapist”, then an “alleged child rapist” and finally settled on “ex-alleged child rapist”. Just using the epithet “child rapist” suggests that Spacey preyed on very young children, when the only accusations that actually went to trial were from someone who claimed that they’d been assaulted when they were 14 years old.

That would have been awful (had it happened), but it’s somehow less awful than if they’d been 5 years old. I’m not sure the law makes a distinction, but terminology does, as someone who assaults a 5-year-old is a pedophile whereas the term for someone who assaults someone who is post-pubescent, but still under the age of consent is ephebophile. Using other terminology imbues descriptions with implicit judgments. It’s like deciding whether to call someone “president” or “ex-president” or “mister” when speaking about someone who’s been President of the United States.

He’s been exonerated. Is there a point at which it’s no longer OK to call Kevin Spacey a child rapist? I think it’s accurate that they both eventually landed on “ex-alleged child rapist”, because it’s technically true. But with those rules, someone could accuse someone else of being a child rapist, stop doing that, and then technically still be able to call that person an “ex-alleged child rapist” for the rest of their lives. You get to continue to cram the words “child rapist” into every sentence mentioning that person’s name without running the risk of slander. A neat trick.

From Spacey’s Wikipedia entry:

“In his first British court appearance, on June 16, Spacey denied the allegations against him.[184] On July 14, he pleaded not guilty to the charges in London.[185][186] On November 16, the CPS authorized an additional seven charges against Spacey, all related to a single complainant arising from incidents alleged to have occurred between 2001 and 2004.[187][188] Three charges were dismissed before or during the trial, which began on June 28, 2023, and, on July 26, 2023, a jury found Spacey not guilty of the remaining nine charges.[4][5]”

If none of that matters—if the outcomes of trials don’t matter—then people just don’t believe in the rule of law anymore. They believe in their gut feelings more. If society allows people to slander other people based on their gut feelings, then we have chaos.

There seems to be no mechanism for lowering the relevance of an accusation from the public record if there are enough people interested in maintaining it and there is no drawback to doing so. Once you’re accused of something, you’re that thing for as long as people say you are. Where relevant, it’s the only thing you’ll ever be, whether you did it or not, whether it could be proven or not.

This obviously opens the door to completely fantastical character-assassination, but people seem to enjoy doing it so much that they don’t care. Most people also know that it will never happen to them. I wonder what engenders such an instinct for injustice? Is it mean-spiritedness? Spitefulness? Or is it a subconscious awareness of injustice in their own lives that makes them lash out at those wildly more successful? Is this one of the few weapons that people have against the obscenely wealthy and successful? You know, because we’ve utterly failed to put a check on amassing stupid amounts of wealth and the gap between the top 1% and the rest of us continues to grow?

Michael Jackson and Woody Allen fall into this category as well. Nothing was ever proven, with every case involving a large number of self-interested parties muddying the waters to the point where you can barely tell what is legitimate and what is an allegation. Journalists piled on for the delicious feeling of destroying a person’s reputation, while C-suites in companies dined out on the increase in advertising revenue. It’s a win-win. All it requires is an inconsequential sacrifice. It doesn’t matter whether they did anything wrong. They will have retroactively done something wrong, else why would they have been accused? Lurid “facts” stick in the mind that have no basis in reality, but come to define what everyone “knows” about what happened.

The Jan. 6 Debate | Glenn’s Most Heated Exchanges by Glenn Greenwald (YouTube)

This was an incredibly stressful “debate”. It was absolutely awful to watch. I mean who cares what any of these people think? Half of them sell vitamin supplements as their full-time job. The one dude Destiny was trying to talk as quickly as he could at all times, in the hope that getting in more words wins debates. In fairness, Glenn was doing this, too. Then Destiny looked like he was having a low-key heart-attack for the rest of the “debate”. He was annoying and smug and wrong, but I kind of felt sorry for him. His BP must have been through the roof.

I thought Glenn’s description of the difference between stealing an election and rigging an election was good. Every election is rigged, if we’re honest. Gerrymandering, propaganda soup, voter suppression etc. all contribute to rigging. It’s a tragedy that we have to make the distinction, though.

Economy & Finance

Does Capitalism Beat Charity? by Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten)

“[…] it doesn’t seem obvious that Instacart “causes” jobs. Suppose Instacart had never been founded. Then people would spend whatever money they now spend on Instacart on something else (let’s say booze and porn), which would also create jobs (for brewers, bartenders, and porn stars). There’s no particular reason to think spending the money on Instacart creates more jobs than spending it on those other things would. So how many jobs does Instacart create over replacement? I’m not sure but I think it must be much less than the official number of employees.”

“Instacart pays its employees, who then go on to stimulate the economy somewhere else. And it saves its customers time, which they can spend on productive economic activity. On the other hand, saving people’s lives allows them to engage in productive activity too. Fewer diseases mean families can spend more money on things other than medical care, and fewer childhood infections potentially means higher IQ and potential as an adult. I don’t think Instacart trivially wins this one either.”

“There are some charities that send economists (or other professionals) to developing countries and advise them on how to do more capitalism. This kind of development aid has been roundly criticized and did especially badly in Russia.”

Because it’s poorly concealed plunder FFS. Stop talking about Russia like it went wrong despite our best intentions. What happened in Russia was exactly according to plan. Extract, extract, extract. Plunder, plunder, plunder. Weaken, weaken, weaken. The only thing that “went wrong” is that Yeltsin couldn’t be replaced with an equally pliant successor when Yeltsin’s obviously plastered and exceedingly corrupt ass could no longer viably continue. Putin sticks in the deep state’s craw—much like Castro—because he got in the way of their final plunder, which would have been to weaken Russia so much that it exploded into its constituent oblasts, which could have been ruled by U.S.-appointed viceroys.

“(also, I’m concerned that even though rich countries got rich because of capitalism, it’s no longer that easy for poor countries to get rich with the same type of capitalism − existing rich countries will outcompete them − and we’re not entirely sure how to help poor countries get rich now , although probably good institutions are always better than bad institutions)”

We know how the currently rich countries got rich, but we choose instead to kick away the ladder, to facilitate plundering them, because that’s how Empire got rich and how Empire stays rich. The Empire is the Mafia. It is not unable to figure out how to help poor countries become rich; it is uninterested in doing so, as that largely interferes with its own success. Scott’s intimation otherwise is a fairy tale that Empire tells about itself that he chooses to believe.

“Finally, you could invest in developing-world projects and companies that seem unusually likely to make an overall economic difference there. I’m nervous about this because of China’s Belt and Road initiative , which did this at huge scale for infrastructure, but doesn’t seem to have done much good (and might have done some bad).”

Maybe you should find out what people in those countries have to say about BRI rather than what the NYT has to say about it.

“[…] if there’s a company that can’t raise enough money to build a dam in Kenya and needs your charity dollar to make the budget work, why hasn’t Wall Street come through for them?”

Crazy right? It’s almost like financial success isn’t at all contingent on doing useful things for society.

Science & Nature

True Facts: Crows That Hunt With Sticks by Ze Frank (YouTube)

Stop what you’re doing and learn about how clever corvids are. There is a lot of footage of them creating grub-digging sticks to quite exacting specifications. It’s quite incredible, but there you are.

“Anyway, science hippies put a camera on the crow’s tail feathers…”

The crows are capable of solving multi-step problems. There are several tubes arrayed around the crow. One of the tubes has food in it, but cannot be reached with the small stick that the crow is given. There is a slightly longer stick in one tube, but it’s also not long enough to reach the food. It is, however, long enough to reach an even-longer stick that is able to reach the food. There is no way to solve the puzzle without using the short stick to get the medium stick and then using the medium stick to get the long stick and then to finally reach the food.

“When she’s trying to figure out how she got into this escape room/restaurant.”

The crow “Pierre” cheats, but he’s “got some pluck.” He tries with the short stick, then flies away to find a longer stick somewhere else, digging out the food with that instead of messing with all of the tubes.

Art & Literature

The DUST Files 'World of Tomorrow Vol. 1' | DUST by DUST (YouTube)

I’m subscribed to Dust, a YouTube channel that shows sci-fi-related short films. They span the gamut of quality. Every once in a while, they make collections of past films, which span the same gamut. This one was especially good: curated well, with good stories and acting in all of the segments.

Philosophy & Sociology

Where is the Rift? Marx, Lacan, Capitalism, and Ecology by Slavoj Žižek (The Philosophical Salon)

“The ultimate ground of this rift is that, in capitalism, the labor process does not serve our needs; its goal is to expanded the reproduction of capital itself, irrespective of the damage it does to our environment. Products count only insofar as they are valorized, and consequences for the environment literally do not count. The actual metabolism of our life process is thus subordinated to the artificial “life” of the reproduction of capital. There is a rift between the two, and the ultimate goal of the Communist revolution is not so much to abolish exploitation, as to abolish this rift.”

“What made the rift explode was the intimate link between capitalism and modern science: capitalist technology, which triggered radical changes in rational environs, cannot be imagined without science, which is why some ecologists have already proposed to change the term for the new epoch we are entering from Anthropocene to Capitalocene.”

“The power of human culture is not only to build an autonomous symbolic universe beyond what we experience as nature, but to produce new “unnatural” natural objects which materialize human knowledge. We not only “symbolize nature”; we, as it were, denaturalize it from within.”

“[…] the main consequence of scientific breakthroughs in biogenetics is the end of nature. Once we know the rules of its construction, natural organisms are transformed into objects amenable to manipulation.”

“It’s the old story of an invention propagated for its benevolent uses (“to clean up microplastic pollution in the oceans,” etc.), with the fact that it is part of a defence (military) project left unsaid. But the crucial point is that an “entirely new lifeform” was created through this combination of a natural organism with a robot, something that exists nowhere in nature. The very expression “the software of life” tells it all: life itself loses its impenetrable density once it is considered to be something regulated by a “software” (a term from computer programming).”

“[…] it is insufficient to locate danger in particular misuses of science due to corruption (like the scientists who support climate change denial) or something similar. The danger resides at a much more general level, concerning the very mode of functioning of science.”

“[…] we should also reject the over-hasty generalization of danger to what Adorno and Horkheimer called “instrumental reason” – the idea that modern science is in its very basic structure directed to dominate, manipulate and exploit nature, plus the concomitant idea that modern science is ultimately just a radicalization of a basic anthropological tendency. (For Adorno and Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, there is a straight line from the primitive use of magic to the influence modern technology wields over natural processes). The danger resides in the specific conjunction of science and capital.”

“Lacan wrote that, even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true, his jealousy is still pathological. The pathological elements is the husband’s need for jealousy as the only way to retain his dignity, identity even. Along the same lines, one could say that, even if most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (they exploit Germans, they seduce German girls…) – which they do not, of course -, their anti-Semitism would still be (and was) a pathological phenomenon because it repressed the true reason why the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position. In the Nazi vision, their society is an organic whole of harmonious collaboration, so an external intruder is needed to account for divisions and antagonisms.”

“[…] the refugees who flee terror are equal to the terrorist they are escaping from, oblivious to the obvious fact that, while there are among the refugees also terrorists, rapists, criminals, etc., the large majority are desperate people looking for a better life. The cause of problems that are immanent to today’s global capitalism is projected onto an external intruder. We find here “fake news” which cannot be reduced to a simple inexactitude: if they (partially, at least) correctly render (some of) the facts, they are all the more dangerously a “fake.” Anti-immigrant racism and sexism are not dangerous because they lie; they are at their most dangerous when the lie is presented in the form of a (partial) factual truth.”

“It is this dimension of truth that eludes science: in the same way that my jealousy is “untrue” even if its suspicions are confirmed by objective knowledge, in the same way that our fear of refugees is false with regard to the subjective position of enunciation it implies even if some facts can confirm it, modern science is “untrue” insofar as it is blind to the way it is integrated into the circulation of capital, to its link to technology and its capitalist use, i.e., to what in old Marxist terms was called the “social mediation” of its activity.”

“[…] it is not only that scientists “don’t care” about the eventual misuse of their work (if this were the case, more “socially conscious” scientists would be enough). Instead, this “not-caring” is inscribed into its structure, coloring the very “desire” that motivates scientific activity which is what Lacan aims at with his claim that science doesn’t have memory.”

“Today’s threats are not primarily external (natural) but self-generated by human activity permeated by science (the ecological consequences of our industry, the psychic consequences of uncontrolled biogenetics, etc.). As a result, the sciences are simultaneously (one of) the source(s) of risks and the sole medium we have to grasp and define the threats. Even if we blame scientific-technological civilization for global warming, we need the same science not only to define the scope of the threat, but often even to perceive the threat.”

“[…] we need a science that is decoupled from both poles: from the autonomous circuit of capital as well as from traditional wisdom, a science that could finally stand on its own. What this means is that there is no return to an authentic feeling of our unity with nature: the only way to confront ecological challenges is to accept fully the radical denaturalization of nature.”

I Think You Should Be Kind by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“The movie is, if we’re inclined to be generous, a parable about the importance of tolerance as a capacious and mutable virtue; it suggests that the literal magic which might provide Jonathan with society’s approval is of lesser importance than the abstract magic of those who are willing to accept our true selves, even when the things we desire are unusual, provided those desires don’t hurt anyone else. None of it would work without Hollywood’s charisma and his infectious kindness.”

“Almost all vertebrate animals exhibit some sort of sexual dimorphism, and saying so does not in any way undermine the case for trans rights. The whole argument is that physiology does not dictate gender, and acknowledging that most people with penises go through life uncomplicatedly accepting a masculine gender does nothing to undermine the felt, lived, and thus very much real gender identities of people who have penises but go through life as women.”

“The vast majority of people who are trans-identifying identify as transmen and transwomen, and not misgendering them is simple. Some people identify as non-binary or gender queer. Do I fully understand this? Not really. Do I need to? No, as I’m someone who knows how to mind his own business. Simple human respect and basic manners compels me to call these people what they would like to be called. (I cannot stress this enough: it costs you nothing to respect someone else’s gender identity.)

“Are there some people out there, particularly on social media, who have more exotic gender definitions? Sure. Do I sometimes find that stuff a little silly? I guess so. But, again, since it costs me nothing to respect their gender identity − as in, I literally don’t have to do anything at all − I’m very happy to do so. I suspect a lot of those people will probably adopt a more conventional gender identity as they age, but if they don’t, again… who cares? It’s none of my business.”

I’ve heard the argument that all of these new identities make extra work for businesses, and agencies, and forms, and such. I suppose it does, at the beginning, but a little flexibility on both sides ameliorates the situation. Forms should stop asking for gender or sex or whatever—unless it’s relevant. They should stop asking for titles—because no-one cares outside of Germany. They should even just move to “Name” and “Preferred Name” and be done with it.

But if someone with an unlisted gender identity has to fill out out a form for a little old lady who needs that item on a form filled out, they could maybe not suspect a vast conspiracy of gender reassignment and just randomly choose one of the ones available.

It’s what I’ve done with all available fields in all sorts of forms for years. I rarely give my real birthdate. I rarely give my real gender. None of it matters online, so don’t make such a big deal out of it.

“In this they are no different from people who take Ozempic or steroids or TRT to treat “fatigue.” If you’re a trans man and you want to look more like conventional ideals of masculinity, you might take hormones. Some trans men have no interest in that, so they don’t take the hormones. It’s not particularly complicated; if you’re concerned about people using medical advances to change their physical bodies, I’m afraid that ship has long since sailed. The hormones don’t make you a woman or a man, they just make your body more like the body you would like to have.”

Excellent point.

“The right to gender self-expression does not require any underlying biological reality. Even if there had never been a single intersexed person born in history, the right to define your gender identity in a way that’s consonant with your heart would remain.”

“Someone asking you to respect their pronouns is by definition not trying to eliminate any notion of sex or gender differences! No one wants you stop calling your kids boys or girls and no one wants you to stop being a man or woman. Besides, I have to live in a country where seven out of ten people believe that God sent Jesus to save us all from a hell he created himself, which doesn’t exactly make a ton of sense to me. And that set of beliefs is of course vastly more consequential than trans rights are for our society. You can live alongside people who believe things you find crazy. That’s the whole point of freedom.”

“[…] let’s say that, over time, transwomen do come to dominate in women’s sports, and at the Olympics in 2028 transwomen are on every podium, OK. Then we as a society will come together and find some equitable, just solution that respects everyone’s rights and personhood, a solution which takes as a core requirement that transwomen be treated with dignity.”

That’s a glib response from someone with no skin in the game. There is a strong focus on sports. Women fought for years to gain legitimacy, which led to the viability of female sports careers. The window is short for them. Some have invested their whole lives.

They were told that their investment is legitimate. Their competition was circumscribed by certain biological realities. Those realities no longer apply. They had grown used to having a chance, to knowing their rank. I think it’s silly, but it’s their lived experience. Fuck them, I guess? Or, maybe, just maybe, we think about it a bit more before just obviously offering preference to those who came later. Those who came before can hardly be expected to react generously, especially when the game is, by definition, zero-sum.

“Not once have I ever been confronted about using language that suggests a gender binary. Not once! Because aside from a class of professional busybodies, most people are normal and just want to be chill about stuff. Honestly. The number of LGBTQ people who just go about their lives, asking only for rights and respect, dwarfs the number who yell at you on TikTok. Yes, there are social justice-y annoyances and excesses in this domain, as there are with any constituencies favored by progressives now. Don’t let that distract you from the fact that almost everyone just wants to live in peace and dignity.”

And, equally, don’t let yourself (FDB) be distracted by all of the extremely loud and boorish and intolerant and hateful voices who overwhelm the more timid voices who have legitimate concerns and questions about how all of this is to work, what is expected from them, what will change for them—in a non-dismissive manner—and how they can navigate the new world. Maybe the answer is that “nothing changes for you” and maybe it’s even true. But people are naturally sensitive to change and have become very accustomed to change meaning “something bad that makes your life tangibly worse.” We owe everyone the same generosity we show to our trans brothers and sisters, don’t we? Holy shit … am I arguing that “all lives matter”? I guess they kind of do.

“I think that there is a cohort of people in our political world now who have made a fetish of counterintuitivity and who have mistaken the absurdities and petty corruption of many liberals for an affirmative argument against any liberal ideals. And that is a powerfully stupid thing to become. Let me say this as directly as I can: adopting a politics that is merely the inverse of what you take to be contemporary liberalism does not make you any less of a follower. You’re still allowing your fundamental political identity to be derived from the beliefs of other people; that you’re trying to turn those beliefs 180 degrees doesn’t make you any more independent.”

“I’m asking you to be kind to a group of people who have become a political football in a way that makes no sense whatsoever, given the scope of our actual problems.”

All humans deserve dignity and comfort. Done. We have bigger fish to fry. Namely, the real possibility that there might not be any humans left to whom we can even give comfort.

“[…] if it’s indeed true that ordinary people reject these values, is it not the case that the rights of trans people are the ones that are in jeopardy, not yours? And might it occur to you that, even if you feel some sort of personal revulsion at the idea of people with penises wearing dresses and people with XX chromosomes being referred to as “he,” the dictates of personal freedom should come first? If you’re a conservative, can you not focus on the wisest conservative value of all, which is the right to be left alone?”

“I worry, for young trans people, that they’ll find transitioning to be just another of these human disappointments − things will be better, no doubt, but as we all tend to do they’ll have idealized the next stage of their lives and then may experience that sudden comedown when they realize that they’re still just humans with human problems. Certainly this happened to many gay people, of the past several generations, finally coming out and living according to the dictates of their hearts, only to be reminded that openly gay people have to pay the rent and squeeze onto the subway and be subject to all of lives little indignities. Equal rights, I’m afraid, generally lead to lives of equal disappointment. I do hope that young LGBTQ people will understand that, beyond all of the Instagram memes telling them to love themselves, there’s still just this broken world.”

“[…] it is better, far better, to be able to say that you are the gender that you feel you are, that you love the people that you say you love, that (even if a bit crass) you are down to fuck the kind of people you want to fuck. It’s easy to be cynical about the gains we’ve had in the past several decades, as I frequently am, but the reality is that in the societies which have dedicated themselves to LGBTQ rights, the ability of people to love and live in a way consonant with their hearts is one of the most significant positive changes in our collective lives, a sign of genuine societal progress.”

Amen.

What Goes On in the Public Bathrooms Where You’re From, Exactly? by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“People attacked me for turning off comments, under the false pretense that I am afraid to debate. On the contrary, I’m more confident in my ability to out-argue anyone than I am in the orbits of the Moon and Sun, I was raised by wolves and trained in the halls of Shaolin, I have done this longer than you have, I am better at it than you are, I fear neither God nor man when it comes to arguing. I turned off comments because I didn’t want to spend days moderating and responding to comments and was unwilling to leave the space unmonitored; I’ve done that before, at my whim, and I will do so again.”

“[…] it appears to me that the trans-affirming and “gender critical” camps have largely segregated themselves into their own spaces, and I think a lot of the people complaining about my piece are simply unaccustomed to actually debating the merits, particularly with someone like me, who can’t be pushed off of his spot through bluster alone.”

“I did what I usually do when it comes to this issue: I asked them what they want. Literally, what do you who oppose so-called “trans ideology” want? What do you want that trans people won’t let you have? What do you want to do, that trans people won’t let you do? This is very instructive, and I think it points to a core reality for a lot of this “gender critical” stuff: those who espouse it are mostly motivated by feelings that trans people are freakish or revolting or ungodly, but know that such arguments have little purchase in modern society, and so dress up those feelings in a lot of argumentative kabuki that doesn’t really add up.”

I usually ask, ‘what should we do, specifically, with the group that you’re railing against? What would it take for you to consider this issue to be resolved?’ Plow ‘em all into the nearest body of water? What is the endgame?’

“[…] the anti-trans contingent talks about this issue as though the very status of having sex-segregated bathrooms amounts to a protection against assault. As I said, this logic seems bizarre to me − someone determined to sexually assault a woman in a bathroom is not going to be deterred by a sign or policy saying that that person can’t be in there.”

Perfectly average and non-psychotically conversative women do too, though. And it’s not really about assault: it’s about making the decidedly uncomfortable custom of using a public restroom even more uncomfortable. I advocate for individual stalls with sinks for everyone, like many places in Switzerland. No.gaps anywhere. Civilized. Obviously this a first-world problem and this is a first-world solution, but we can dare to dream, can’t we?

Still, maybe we could take this opportunity to address how terrible public-restroom infrastructure is for everybody rather than just shuffling the deck chairs. Or I guess you could hypnotize us all into having fewer hangups about public bathrooms. It’s an uphill climb, though. We have little to nothing to do with strangers, but then we gather together into close places to expose the parts of our bodies that society has brainwashed into thinking are our most private, and to perform some of the more noxious acts our bodies are capable of, in environs in which we’re quite poorly shielded from one another, both visually and aurally.

“My argument is that formal policies dictating sex segregations in bathrooms do nothing to actually reduce sexual assault, and can’t, and so the idea that women are losing an important protection is simply incorrect. There is no reason to believe that sex segregated bathrooms, which anyone can walk into at any time, actually protect against sexual assault”

The taboo against going into the wrong bathroom is strong, though. It’s been built up over generations. People actively police it. Don’t pretend you’re stupid enough to think that a reduction in potential contact doesn’t reduce incidents. Why the hell do you think they tell women not to walk down dark streets at night? What difference does it make which street they’re on? By FDB’s argument, rapists are going to find them on any public street anyway, if they really want to. Being able to intervene when seeing a man going into the women’s bathroom makes it easier than having to wait until someone makes a move, already within the relative privacy of the bathroom.

“Let me underline that last part. There is no credible evidence that the presence of transwomen in women’s bathrooms increases the prevalence of sexual assault or any other crime.”

The “there is no credible evidence” is disingenuous. We went through this with COVID. People cited the “testing parachutes” story ad nauseum. Sometimes you have to make a decision with little to no evidence because no evidence for or against exists, I would warrant, because the situation is too new for any data to have been gathered. For and against are both engaging in speculation, are both asking for things to be done based on gut feelings. You either have a gut feeling that allowing biologically male people into women’s bathrooms will cause problems or you don’t. You don’t have any evidence either way (yet).

But what I’ve heard from people who are not psychotic and hateful strangers online is that women are not afraid of actual transwomen. No. They are instead afraid that others, riding on easier access, will cause problems. It’s debatable! Of course it’s debatable. But the fear exists. And it causes discomfort. And it leads to pushback.

I think it behooves us not to overestimate members of our own cisgender here (males) because they are capable of truly disgusting acts and many of them hold truly shocking opinions and attitudes, in their heart of hearts. Especially when drunk. While I admit that being able to prevent obvious males from entering women’s bathrooms was a crude and shitty tool to prevent assault, but I’m not as ready to round its effectiveness down to zero as FDB is.

“And if we acknowledge that sex segregated bathrooms do nothing to create an impediment to sexual assault, then the only way to seek to exclude transwomen from women’s bathrooms is to base that desire on the evidence-free claim that trans people are unusually likely to commit sex crimes.”

That’s quite a leap, but again, I think that you’re listening to all the shitty people online. That’s not at all the argument I’ve heard when talking to relatively normal, real-life people. I’ve heard that women are worried, whether that’s justified or not. Perhaps they hate change. A lot of people hate change, even if what they’ve gotten used to isn’t particularly good for them or others—or fair to themselves or others—they’re still going to cling, by default. It’s a natural instinct to not consider what harm your lifestyle is doing to others, especially when you don’t think you have it so great yourself. People are like this.

Making an argument that condemns nearly everyone isn’t very helpful (even if you’re morally in the right). What I trying to say is, that the reason they feel this way doesn’t have to be overtly evil. There’s room to work here, I think, but you can’t just bull-in-a-china-shop accuse everyone who doesn’t already agree with you of being transphobic. Well, you can, but that almost guarantees that your movement will stay pretty exclusive. That can’t be what you want? Or maybe the tactic will work, who knows. It works for getting people to buy a whole new wardrobe every season of every year.

At any rate, women—reasonably or unreasonably doesn’t matter, ‘cause its feelings—see their collective discomfort and angst as being increased for the benefit of a handful of people, who were born male and now jump the line of victimhood ahead of women. Even if it will never personally affect them, it sticks in their craw.

Not being careful here might mean pushing away a large group of potential allies by dismissing their concerns and calling them TERFs. Also: preventing actual physical assault is a pretty low bar. Women are concerned about all sorts of things. They’re worried about assholes pretending to be trans to get their disgusting pervy selves into women’s bathrooms. They’re worried that they won’t be able to taboo-shame them out of there anymore. They’re worried that they’ll feel less safe and they’ll also be derided by a potential attacker that they know is only pretending to be trans for being anti-trans themselves. People are shitty. You seem to be forgetting how a system can be hacked.

Just rounding up anyone with questions to TERFs is not productive, but you do you. I personally think we should reduce contact with strangers when we’re at our most vulnerable in public. I think we should stop peeing into drinking water. But I’m a weirdo.

“I’ve never seen someone else’s penis because the way it works is, you go in, you keep your eyes trained at your feet, you pee in such a way as to minimize the chances of anyone else seeing your junk, you zip up, you wash your hands, and you walk out.”

You claim to be totally OK with it, but the way you’ve described the custom of public urination doesn’t suggest anything comfortable about the experience. You’re describing an inherently uncomfortable practice as if it’s perfectly ok to feel mortified while micturating in public—a screaming desire for privacy is hammered into a lot of us. The whole public-bathroom scene flies in the face of this.

“This is where the TERFy element attacks me, a man, for talking about women’s spaces. But of course there are many millions of cisgender women who are trans-affirming and who welcome transwomen into women’s bathrooms, and I’m sure some of them will be very willing to express the same sentiments I’m expressing.”

Anyone incapable of articulating their angst sufficiently eloquently and clearly for FDB is a TERF whose angst can be dismissed. I’m kind of surprised to see him come out this hard, but maybe I’m not getting what he’s saying. But it seems like he can’t conceive of anyone having doubts without being full-on anti-trans. That’s probably being ungenerous, but he’s reformulated his thoughts in this direction just in this essay several times now.

We can’t possibly suddenly only care about trans feelings and not about ciswomen’s feelings, can we? Or is anyone with the wrong misgivings an enemy who loses their right to speak on the topic because of those misgivings? Somehow, if you’re not able to prove why you feel the way you do, you get ostracized rather than helped. Unless, of course, you’re in one of the right minority groups whose completely justifiable feelings are what kicked this whole things off. Neat trick. Very progressive.

It feels just like when society gets rid of jobs for the sake of progress, when no-one cares about helping those who will be affected to transition to the brave new world. This is similar: let those dozens of millions of women who’ve kind of figured out public bathrooms—let them figure out how to be enlightened on their own. If they can’t? Fuck ‘em. Backwoods hicks. I feel sometimes like FDB’s brain is still in Brooklyn. Try thinking about the part of the country that isn’t comfortable enough—doesn’t have enough free time—to spend a ton of time getting their morals straight, who don’t want change because it has historically almost always means regress, not progress, for them.

FBD is fighting the loud idiots online here. He’s thinking of his friends in Brooklyn (I know he now lives somewhere that he almost certainly calls “upstate”, but which can still see the glow of NYC on the horizon) and he’s talking to idiots online. His comments section has a massive selection bias.

I know we started off trying to help people, but God forbid you try to help anyone who gets in the way, even slightly, even temporarily, even unwittingly. I mean helping people who are not whatever fad-minority-of-the-moment it’s popular to help. No-one got any likes online for trying to convince normal women to ease up a bit, it’ll be OK, we’ll get through this together. Trans people should be able to be just as uncomfortable in public as the rest of us. No more and no less. So maybe this is egalitarian? It will distribute the extra discomfort that trans people has right now to the much-larger group that should pretty easily be able to accommodate it.

But maybe pretending like you’re asking for their help would ease the transition, I dunno. I know, I know, you shouldn’t have to beg and cajole for rights! Being on the side of justice is one thing but, man, I wonder how just a little bit of sugar in some of these arguments might not go a long way. Some people are lost causes, of course, but you shouldn’t just shitcan everyone else. You’re only making things harder for yourself.

“The question is whether we can protect the dignity and safety of trans people, the vast majority of whom simply want to live their lives, while we wait for them to do so.”

Absolutely, they should have as much dignity and comfort in public restrooms as I do, but that’s a pretty low bar. I pretty much despise public restrooms. I despise the openness of urinals, but rue the waste of water that is peeing into a toilet. You’re uncomfortable using what you think isn’t the right bathroom for you? I’m uncomfortable using the only one I can reasonably claim as my own. And discomfort is often hindering to micturition. At least you have hope for change for the better. 🤷‍♀️

No Discourse Has Ever Been More Discourse-y Than Age Gap Discourse by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“I’ve been saying for years that while it saddens me if a white shopkeeper feels a shot of fear when a Black person wanders into their store, that feeling is far less morally and politically important than the decision not to do anything about it. The shopkeeper may not be able to quell his racist impulses, but he most certainly can choose not to chase those Black customers around. And so too with the “teens are supposed to be sexy” set. It makes no difference what evolution “wants” you to do because you are an autonomous being who can make adult choices. Evolution is not literally controlling you. The moral dictate, in human life, is not to be or feel in some pure way. The moral dictate is to act ethically.”

“Even if feeling sexually attracted to teenagers really was normal/valid/biologically ordained, that would not and could not change the fact that we as a society have come to the hard-won understanding that people below a certain age, the age of consent, are not emotionally equipped to intelligently choose to participate in sexual acts with adults. The prohibition isn’t about the older person’s desire at all, really; it’s a simple moral and legal consequence of an empirical understanding about the inability of young people to give informed consent. The legitimacy of your sexual desire is no more relevant to the question of whether you should have sex with someone who’s underage than the legitimacy of your desire for money is relevant to the question of whether you should mug someone.”

Billionaire's Anti-Palestine ATTACK on Academic Freedom (w/ Norm Finkelstein) by Bad Faith (YouTube)

To think I almost shrunk away from the 150-minute runtime. It passes very quickly. Excellent conversation.

At 27:00 they say,

“Norman: I don’t recall a single article that said ‘[…] do you realize what just happened? A billionaire decided who’s going to be the president of the most revered academic Institute Institution in our country.‘

“What happened to peer competence? […] What happened to faculty self-governance? That’s the basic principle. There’s a faculty senate. The faculty Senate is supposed to be integral to making the decisions about who are the administrators on your campus and your university. All of that totally destroyed by what they did. So, given the rank of the people they went after and it was such a brazen assault—it was, let’s be clear, it was in broad daylight blackmail. That’s what it was. It was in broad daylight blackmail.

“Now you might say or Robbie might say well it’s a private institution and they have uh and you have the right to give or withhold your money you know as an alumnus you know you give her which is absolutely true if you do it quietly you make the decision to yourself you know what I think Harvard has gotten too woke for my taste I’m not giving them any more money sure you have the right to do that first of all you know speaking as a person of the left I don’t think you should have that kind of money and this is another example of the problem when you have that kind of money yes the problem is you can control everything yes control everything.

“Briahna: That’s such an important Point there’s a democracy aspect to wanting to tax the rich because nobody should have enough money to buy and sell careers and set the academic course for an entire University or of course by Congress.

“Norman: totally agree you not only have the money to do it you think you’re entitled to do it this guy this hedge fund manager thinks he has the right to determine who is the president of Harvard that’s a real problem that’s called the technical term is megalomania H when you think you have the right to determine who should be the president of a university because you happen to have a lot of money there’s a real problem there but it was it was blackmail in broad daylight because as I said you you have the right that’s the way the capitalist system works you know to give or not to give in some philanthropic or whatever venture but, when you broadcast it—when you say I’m withholding $100 million until you get rid of Claudine Gay—that becomes blackmail in my opinion. Whatever you do in private do it in private but when you start announcing that—broadcasting it—it’s turned into blackmail.”

At 41:30 they say,

“Norman: maybe I’m oldfashioned about this but I think a doctoral dissertation at MIT which plagiarizes extensively from Wikipedia is a whole other kettle of fish. You know, that’s very that’s problematic, in my opinion. So, I’m not ready to—my
threshold does not allow for that.

“Briahna: The problem there isn’t plagiarizing Wikipedia. The problem there is using Wikipedia as a source instead of doing the more rigorous exercise of using of looking at the sources that Wikipedia is citing for the proposition and following those down the thread and and researching and making sure that there’s accuracy there yourself that’s that’s what she is really being faulted for when we’re talking about plagiarizing for Wikipedia not the idea that whatever definition of whatever noun she’s trying to define in her paper. Whatever idea she’s trying to define in her paper isn’t probably accurate just because it’s on Wikipedia it’s about the intellectual rigor of her research that’s not okay.”

This discussion about plagiarism was quite good, on the level of what “plagiarism” actually is. I think it’s a shame that these two lent too much credence to the “software” that was used to detect plagiarism. The article The plagiarism circus by Mark Liberman (Language Log) cites another article The Plagiarism War Has Begun: Claudine Gay was taken down by a politically motivated investigation. Would the same approach work for any academic? by Ian Bogost (The Atlantic), which detailed what it was like using one of these tools to investigate your own paper, a paper which the author knows is impeccable.

The machine just runs and spits out of a horrible score. It’s up to you to determine what to do with it. If you’re actually interested in detecting real plagiarism, then you’ll analyze the results and tweak the input parameters. If you’re just interested in getting a black-box result from a tool that you can claim is authoritative that says that an enemy plagiarized their work, then you can stop right here.

Bogost took a closer look and noticed that the tool doesn’t actually detect plagiarism. It detects similarities in text to other published texts. If you have written a popular paper that has been cited in other papers afterwards, then the tool cheerily will tell you that large sections of its the paper is also contained in other papers and let the lazy—or duplicitous—user simply round that up to plagiarism.

Bogost used iThenticate—which is, apparently, related to Turnitin—to test. I have no familiarity with either of these tools.

His initial analysis of his ~68k-word thesis yielded a result that 74% of the text was replicated in other documents. A facile interpretation would round that up to a shocking level of plagiarism. He had to manually filter out works that had been published after his, that were citing his paper—because why should that happen automatically? The software knows all of the publication dates, doesn’t it?

There’s a checkbox to “exclude bibliography”, which causes the software to suddenly recognize that work copied from other works that have been referenced is OK and not plagiarism. A similar checkbox no longer flagged quoted material that had been footnoted, which, again, seems like a no-brainer to leave on. The text “Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.” was also flagged as having been found in other works.

There were many other common phrases that it threw up as noise—because having the phrase “to preserve the” can’t in any sane world be considered to have been copied. It flagged proper names, titles, etc. It flagged phrases as having been copied from work that had absolutely nothing to do with the document being analyzed—something a human would never, ever do. If you’re writing a these on Shakespeare and there is a sentence or two that matches exactly two sentences found in an analysis of taxoplasmosis in Belgian cats, then no-one would imagine in their most feverish imagining that you’d stolen those two filler sentences from that paper. But this software cheerily flags it as “found in other works”. Bravo.

Oh, OK, so the software is doing no work to help you actually detect copies. It seems to filter nothing out, despite costing $300 for this one paper. That seems like a nice, lucrative business. It seems like the tool’s default settings are to pump the possible plagiarisms as high as possible. Again, it’s probably more lucrative that way. Whether there’s a knock-on effect of insufficiently substantiated accusations of plagiarism doesn’t matter to them. Most people will almost certainly lend these tools far too much credibility because there will be no downside for doing so and the upside is massively less time spent checking for plagiarism. Whether there is plagiarism or not will soon be determined by the output of these tools. That is, with plagiarism being such a vague topic for most, they won’t notice when the standard changes. That the standard changes because of laziness and corporate greed doesn’t seem to matter, either. It will just change.

Long story short: when someone says that they used a tool to detect plagiarism, it means essentially nothing on its own. Before you lend any weight to that “evidence”, you have to find out more details.

I wish Norman had made his point that it’s the politics of the slogan that’s important. She was right that you can’t force a slogan down people’s throats. But I wish she’d understood that he was saying that you can’t force people to like your slogan and stop misinterpreting it. This would be an opportunity to say: what would be a better slogan? To collaborate with detractors to figure out what is wrong with the slogan. What is wrong with “from the river to the sea”? Is it that Palestinians should have rights at all? Or that it seems like there should be one state? Without Israelis? Without Jews? What does it mean? As Norman said, there is room for interpretation there. You can’t not acknowledge it.

Briahna’s right that there are some people who will be offended no matter what, because those people’s beef is with Palestinians having rights at all. But you also can’t just ignore that a slogan has been made politically charged. Well, you can, but you do so at your own peril. At least be honest about what the drawbacks might be.

The drawback might be that your opponents manage to pigeonhole your entire movement into insignificance by convincing a large part of the public that you’re all terrorists. Talk to people who read the New York Times—they definitely already think this. This tactic has worked before. Finkelstein is old enough to know. Briahna is frustrated and ready to say ‘screw it’. It’s hard to say who’s right. Capitulation to relentless, unyielding, and perennially unreasonable opponents? Or possible irrelevance and a lost cause?

She makes a good point that it’s patronizing to tell people who’ve been chanting a slogan for 50 years that they don’t understand what they mean by it. But she’s slightly off again, in that Norman is saying that they know what they mean by it, but they should be explicitly aware of the political ramifications of continuing to use a slogan that can be used as a weapon against them.

There is no easy answer: if you capitulate, then your opponents will smell blood in the water and outlaw any slogan you come up with. Meanwhile, anyone who continues to use a slogan that the movement has acknowledged is potentially problematic will immediately be upgraded to the status of terrorists advocating for the elimination of all Jews. They will point to the agreement to stop using the slogan as justification for this, arguing that no-one would use the slogan unless they really meant the bad thing that we grudgingly agreed it might mean in the most ungenerous possible interpretation.

It is possible that there is no winning against opposition like this! I almost agree with Briahna that we should just say “fuck ‘em” before investing a single second trying to appease opponents who will expressly never be appeased. But I think she’s argues inelegantly in that she jumps to the conclusion without once acknowledging Norman’s argument that there are political drawbacks—some quite severe and potentially movement-ending—to doing so. They often talk past one another like this. They’re so close to agreement, but neither is capable of fully formulating their argument in a way that the other would be able to accept the “yes, but” and be done with it, even after half-an-hour of discussion.

At 2:13:30, she finally summarizes her position quite well, though,

“[…] bad-faith actors—people with an agenda—are going to do and say what they got to do to press their agenda and at a certain point you cannot spend your entire life running away from the criticism of people who are never going to agree with you. If you’re in a place where you’re talking to good-faith people and they find a slogan so pernicious that someone who otherwise would be on your team isn’t going to be on your team, fine, but the example that you raised with your friend: either she’s down with the Zionist project or she isn’t and if she isn’t, that’s fine, but she was never going to be on the ‘From The River To The Sea, Palestine Must Be Free” team anyway.”

I think there’s the problem, though. “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free.” doesn’t mean “end the Zionist project” to everyone. It doesn’t even mean that to people to most people actually chanting it.

Right after that, she goes off (which is kind of awesome).

“[…] it is a trap, in and of itself, it is a trap to thwart the momentum of a movement and to distract people from doing what they should be doing to advance righteous causes to be stuck on a hamster wheel, trying to convince people who are being paid to disagree with you, whose incentive structure is set up to disagree with you, and I don’t care anymore. I’m tired of tiptoeing around not saying that things that are blatantly racist are racist because some yokel […] somewhere is going to think poorly of it. I have extended so much grace to these people and the returns on that investment are not worth it to me at this point.”

I do think that it’s dangerous to have your political tactics and even strategy be a reaction to the worst people you hear from online. You don’t have to engage with them. No-one is saying you have to engage with the most horrible people. You just have to be aware to what degree you’re rounding up everyone who disagrees with you to the group of people who call you a monkey online.

That is the danger: that you become the kind of person who dismisses anyone who doesn’t already agree with everything they have to say, including signing on to the interpretation of a slogan which, quite frankly, people only chose because it rhymes in English. If more than half of the people to whom you’re directing the slogan—the people you’re trying to convince of the rightness of your cause, the people whom you’re trying to convince to help you achieve justice—are misunderstanding the implication and are afraid of being ostracized for using the slogan or for associating with people who do, then you have a problem that you have to look squarely in the face.

If your reply is “I don’t care,” that may be the smartest reply given the situation. But it might also be too easy. Because you have to at least explicitly acknowledge that your cause may end with that slogan, that this will be the thing that your opponents use—rightly or wrongly—to torpedo your whole cause. And they won’t care how unfair or shockingly meretricious they behaved in getting what they wanted. They will have won because they managed to make you and your movement inconsequential. You will have died on the hill of the slogan when your original goal was to gain freedom for a people.

And also because—even just a little bit—it became about you. It became about you not giving in to trolls. And that’s the shitty thing about trolls: they win either way, as long as you engage. Even by not engaging, by continuing to do what you were going to do, their influence over what others think about what you’re doing and saying and advocating for might end up being what matters. You’ll end up sitting there, staring at the shambles of your movement, wondering where it went wrong, how it is that you lost support.

What went wrong is that building movements is about convincing a bunch of ADHD adults to care, to be empathetic. And your opponents just have to appeal to the inner asshole in a bunch of anonymous people. It’s an uphill climb, to say the least.

Right at the end, there was a segment of Krystal Ball with a cohost (who I didn’t recognize). I think they thought the segment was meant to prove that the Congressman being interviewed was no longer able to just push people into silence by implying that they’re anti-semitic. What it looked like to me was that the Congressman was actually quite reasonably asking the host to have some empathy with the Israeli people, who fear for their lives.

This is absolutely true! They 100% fear for their lives! I’ve spoken with some of them. They think that an attack on their country is imminent, not from Gaza, but from the north, from Lebanon. They’re positively paranoid about Iran. Just because I empathize with the pain and fear they must be feeling doesn’t mean I lend credence to their feeling that they’re going to be invaded. They’re deluded, but they’re still in pain, is the point.

I thought that the Congressman said that quite well and quite eloquently, at least at first. Once the host badgered him more, he quickly fell back on the hoary tropes of a perennially persecuted people, of ghettos and pogroms. None of that has relevance today. The people in Israel have lived in safety for generations by now. They haven’t had a single thing to legitimately fear for 60 years. They make up all of this shit so that they can bristle outwards and justify preemptive aggression in the service of colonialism and empire-building (if much more modest, of course, than papa bear’s).

Speaking of papa bear: this is the same thing that the US does. Talk to an American and you will hear of ludicrous fears that they legitimately feel. It’s been like this for generations in that country, as well. They think the Russians are going to invade. I get stuff from my father-in-law with intricate plans of how the Chinese are going to make a pincer movement from the Canadian and Mexican borders. Their pain is real. We can empathize with it without believing in the things that cause it.

So, no, I don’t think that the clip showed what they thought it showed. It was more a kind of dunking on a guy who was actually trying to be reasonable. The guy said he empathizes with Palestinians. He said that he also empathizes with Israelis. Ask him what he means by that exactly rather than just assuming that he uses it as code for saying that he supports the extermination of Palestinians.

Stop trying to go for a win for yourself and figure out if you can get the guy to hang himself. Imagine if you’d expressed empathy for the people of Israel, most of whom are just as trapped in the fear-spiral of bad foreign policy and a completely morally bankrupt leadership and media as Americans are. Imagine if you’d asked him what he thought they feared, exactly. What are we being asked to empathize with? Their fear that Hezbollah will attack? Or their fear that they won’t get a cheap home in a new settlement in Gaza?

I thought it was interesting when Finkelstein said that Martin Luther King didn’t want Stokely Carmichael to push the “black power” slogan because he was quite certain that it would be interpreted by those in power as “we’re taking away your power”, which, in many ways, they definitely wanted to, right? They wanted to take away the white power that they should never have been able to arrogate to themselves in the first place. But it’s threatening and endangering the project. It’s not exactly jettisoning allies, but it’s making it much more difficult for people the become allies. It’s going to make them wonder what they’re actually advocating for. You want to be as clear as possible. Equal rights for all is a good slogan.

Sal Khan, Serial Education Revolutionary by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“No revolutions are coming to education because school outcomes are dictated by”

• Inequalities of race and class in American society which ensure that students learn in profoundly different life environments, regardless of what happens in the classroom, and which 40+ years of effort have not been able to ameliorate through school-side reforms, and
• the combination of genetic and environmental effects that together produce an inherent, intrinsic, more-or-less immutable level of academic potential for every individual student.

“Until and unless we as a society come to terms with the fact that we are no more able to control the educational outcomes of our students than we are their personalities, tastes, or interests, we’re stuck. But nobody ever got rich talking about what we can’t do. Duolingo’s stock price isn’t going to get a bump from its CEO talking about failure and limits, and Google isn’t going to carve out market share by telling people to have realistic expectations. Acknowledging the profound limitations of formal schooling, whether for closing academic gaps or erasing social inequality, has the benefit of embracing the truth, but there’s no money in it, and the kind of gullible rubes with deep pockets who donate money in this space hate to hear it. (Reed Hastings is going to go to his grave shoveling cash into a furnace labeled “School Reform.”) Until sense overcomes hype, optimism bias will dominate and gurus like Khan, somehow too cynical and too idealistic at the same time, will flourish.”

Technology

Universal Failure by Charles MacFarlane (The Baffler)

“All wars, as they become history, are in danger of being romanticized, their harsh realities and mistakes forgotten, and the reappraisal of UCP by younger people feels like the canary in the coal mine of Iraq War nostalgia. Focusing on the camouflage is a way to keep the focus on nuts and bolts, without having to reflect on the wider politics and controversies of the war. The 2003 invasion and subsequent war was anything but a more innocent time for the country—it feels insane to even suggest it. The war killed approximately 200,000 Iraqi civilians along with 4,492 American servicemen, and the country is far from settled now, twenty years on. But for young people coming of age today, whose engagement with the conflict has occurred mostly through pop culture and aesthetics, it can appear that way.”

Why Are Tech Reporters Sleeping On The Biggest App Store Story? by Alex Russell (Infrequently Noted)

“With shockingly few exceptions, coverage of app store regulation that the answer to crummy, extractive native app stores is other native app stores. This unexamined framing shapes hundreds of pieces covering regulatory events, including by web-friendly authors. The tech press almost universally fails to mention the web as a substitute for native apps and fail to inform readers of its potential to disrupt app stores.”

“[…] browsers unchained can do to mobile what the web did to desktop, where more than 70% of daily “jobs to be done” happen on the web.”

“None of the linked articles note browser competition’s potential to upend app stores. Browsers unshackled have the potential to free businesses from build-it-twice proprietary ecosystems, end rapacious app store taxes, pave the way for new OS entrants — all without the valid security concerns side-loading introduces.”

“[…] it’s hard to overlook that tech reporters live like wealthy people, iPhones and all. From that vantage point, it’s often news that the web is significantly more capable on other OSes (never mind that they spend much of every day working in a desktop browser). It’s hard to report on the potential of something you can’t see for yourself.”

Browsers on other OSs are significantly more capable because desktop is significantly more capable. I wonder how much hand-wavy evaluation of capabilities is involved here. I know that a lack of push notifications was one, but are there others that are comparable? I know a ton of work has been done on getting CSS compatibility.

“Sunsetting the 30% tax requires a compelling alternative, and Apple’s simultaneous underfunding of Safari and compelled adoption of its underpowered engine have interlocked to keep the web out of the game.”

I wasn’t aware it was so weak relative to Chromium and Firefox. Is this true?

“Removed from the need to police security (browsers have that covered) and handle distribution (websites update themselves), PWA app stores like store.app can become honest-to-goodness app management surfaces that can safely facilitate discovery and sync.”

“It’s no surprise that Apple and Google have kept private the APIs needed to make this better future possible. They built the necessary infrastructure for the web to disrupt native, then kept it to themselves. This potential has remained locked away within organisations politically hamstrung by native app store agendas. But all of that is about to change.”

“More than 30 years have passed since we last saw effective tech regulation. The careers of those at the top have been forged under the unforgiving terms of late-stage, might-makes-right capitalism, rather than the logic of open markets and standards. Today’s bosses didn’t rise by sticking their necks above the parapets to argue virtue and principle. At best, they kept the open web dream alive by quietly nurturing the potential of open technology, hoping the situation would change.”

“The modern administrative state indulges firms with “as much due process as money can buy” , and Apple knows it, viciously contesting microscopic points. When bluster fails, huffingly implemented, legalistic, hair-splitting “fixes” are deployed on the slowest possible time scale. This strategy buys years of delay, and it’s everywhere: browser and mail app defaults, payment alternatives, engine choice, and right-to-repair. Even charging cable standardisation took years longer than it should have thanks to stall tactics. This maximalist, joined-up legal and lobbying strategy works to exhaust regulators and bamboozle legislators. Delay favours the monopolist.”

“Apple’s actual argument to the Competition Appeal Tribunal amounted to a mashup of rugged, free-market fundamentalist “ but mah regulatory certainty!” , performative fainting into strategically placed couches, and feigned ignorance about issues it knows it’ll have to address in other jurisdictions.”

Fun

Schisspfoste 5.0 (Reddit)

s’Lebe isch scho knueg schwer

“Interviewer: “Was denked sie zum Schwiizer Franke?”

“Reh: “Ich ha 5 Räppler nöd so gern, die sind immer so dammi lang im Portmonaie und s Lebe isch scho knueg schwer.””

The great silent majority of American basicness by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

the sun is going down and you're getting cold

“imagine spending the better part of the last 5 years having your brain and ego melted by uninterrupted /pol/ exposure, flying to washington in the middle of a pandemic to hear trump whine about oprah and mike pence at a rally, marching up to congress on his orders to smash shit and then mill around aimlessly

“you go home and hear that biden won anyway and all of your favorite twitter news sources named like Patriot Newsman Of the West with avatars of roman statues have posted your photo online and are labeling you a “gay communist antifa actor.” then the next day the god emperor you pasted into warhammer memes puts out a video cucking himself and bending the knee. “I’m sorry, those were heinous acts! p-please let me tweet again jack!!” you can’t leave de because the airlines have dubbed you a flight risk. you can’t stay because the cops are actively looking for you after one of their own died. your roommate at the only hotel that would accept you is a guy named based_kekistani1 488 who wants to show you his goblin slayer torrents. the sun is going down and you’re getting cold.”

There’s also this video: It’s the 3rd anniversary of Jan 6th and this is my favourite 2020 election cope video. (Twitter)

Good X-Men (Reddit)

Professor X joke

“Professor X: whats your mutant power
Me: I can quess how many pulls to turn a ceiling fan off on the first try [points up] 2 pulls
Professor X: [stands up and pulls twice] not bad, but not a power
Me: I’m kidding; I can heal paraplegics
Professor X: [still standing] holy shit”