Angie Han

Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong The pushback against ICE exposed a series of mistaken assumptions.

"The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave."

It can get lower!

Our Customers Demand Terrible AI Systems We’ve been banging our heads against the wall, trying to think of the new “it” thing our customers want. At one point, somebody suggested improving...

"Customers only care about one thing: barely functioning AI crammed into every facet of their lives."
www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/our...

A war correspondent who says Minneapolis reminds him most of the Arab Spring, which he witnessed firsthand. Vivid portrait of decentralized resistance in the US, & the persistence of community organizing after George Floyd’s murder & the continued hypernormalization of trauma on our schoolchildren.

If you're living somewhere outside the USA, one thing you can do is pressure your leaders to boycott World Cup and Olympic events here.

in case you're curious about how angry Minnesota is about ICE, it was -20 today

Do it. I beg you. This madness ends a lot faster if billionaires lose money.

Taylor Sheridan and the curse of certainty Taylor Sheridan and the curse of certainty

Taylor Sheridan's politics may be hard to pin down, but his weary, know-it-all worldview is depressingly common.

The People vs. ICE Renee Good’s death galvanized a city eager to push back against Trump’s invasion.

I wrote about Minneapolis.

nymag.com/intelligence...

Interesting note about Sinners’ 16 nominations—it was nominated in every single category it could’ve been.

There are 24 Oscar categories, and the eight it missed are the three Shorts, Animated Feature, Doc Feature, International Film, Adapted Screenplay, and Lead Actress.

16 oscar nods for sinners. The anti “woke” tantrum is gonna be off the charts

Another friend put it to me like this: "ICE has made the classic Nazi mistake. They've invaded a winter people in the winter."

People can say they didn’t vote for this but people are liars

JK Rowling pledges to keep up fight against SNP trans policies Author vows to bankroll campaigners after Scottish government fails to pay group's legal fees in Supreme Court equality case

It cannot be made clearer.

If you continue to support the Harry Potter franchise in any way, you are directly funding the removal of trans people's human rights in the UK.

Finally took a moment to create a tribute to my favorite part of #StarfleetAcademy (a show I'm so far liking quite a bit!): Holly Hunter's... unique approach to sitting in the captain's chair.

ooh can't wait to see

Yet the more I think about this, the more I think "everything is content" is almost the right frame but also a slightly too limiting one. It suggests a world mediated by screens, to be sure, where the news can be carefully pacified and turned into just another stream of viral moments. But its undercurrent is always "Well, if we could just turn off the social media spigot/everybody's smartphones/the internet, then everything would just get back to normal," a statement that ignores the role of 24-hour cable news networks and talk radio in the buildup to this moment, among other things. What that statement most ignores is how many of the stories in this moment are less about "good content" and more about forcing a narrative onto the world, then expecting the world to conform to it.

On the right's diehard belief in finding a switch they can flip that will make everyone hateful, Gamergate, and why the vibes aren't shifting.

episodes.ghost.io/vibe-shift/

now that's more like it

How Prediction Markets Turned Life Into a Dystopian Gambling Experiment What are Polymarket and Kalshi? Why are they taking over the world? And is there anything stopping actors on these platforms from exploiting almost everything and everyone?

I wrote about the rise of prediction markets, which have FINALLY made it possible for crypto bros to cosplay as war profiteers while getting fleeced by actual war profiteers

this one weird trick will let you make a talk show but not have to pay union rates

America, JD Vance tells us, is merely a nation like many others ⁠– a “homeland”, he said upon accepting his nomination to the vice-presidency, for “people with a shared history and a common future”. That’s a vision of American identity that would have described bands of cavepeople in skins just as well or better. Stephen Miller’s proleptic defense of seizing Greenland last week suggests the Trumpists themselves know this. “We live in a world, in the real world ... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he declared. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Miller’s laws are the laws of animals. It is true, obviously, that high ideals have long been deployed to obscure or justify predation, here and elsewhere. But Miller’s stance and the stance of the administration is that there aren’t, actually, any high ideals worth pursuing or even pretending to – that the human being, in itself, is nothing so much ⁠and that we are, fundamentally and forever, primitives. Against the demands and best aspirations of civilization – western or any kind – they tell us the human being is a creature that yearns for nothing more than blood and soil, which is, of course, just mud. The lust for mud has taken up many guises in our history and has been many given names of late – neo-reaction, post-liberalism, fascism. But the name familiar to most is evil.

It was evil – the standpoint that only might matters, that human morality, and our sense of reality itself, must yield to the turfism of the primates with the biggest clubs – that ginned up the propaganda that provoked an act of terrorism against our legislature and the policemen defending it five years ago. It is evil that undergirds pronouncements from the same voices responsible for that attack, in defense of the man who shot Renee Nicole Good, that those who disobey the commands of law enforcement, however unsound or unjust, deserve summary execution – that implies, as Fox’s Jesse Watters and others have, that Good’s killing was of trivial significance because she was a lesbian “with pronouns in her bio”. It is evil that sends innocent men to foreign gulags, evil that condemns hundreds of thousands of destitute people abroad to death without a moment’s discussion or debate about what the country they had depended on might owe them, or the furnishing of alternative arrangements for their wellbeing. The gutting of USAID remains this administration’s worst and least surprising offense against the human conscience – a president who rejects the idea that we might have obligations to all within our society can’t be expected to wonder or worry about whether we have obligations to those outside of it. This is also why, after all the noise and nonsense about the need to depose the Maduro regime, the Venezuelan people are now being told that regime will be left in mostly in place for as long as it takes to secure and extract the country’s resources on our terms – that Venezuela will not see democracy unless and until it is profitable for the United States.

Democracy has always been a useless abstraction to those who deny we have basic human entitlements – for those who believe, instead, that the idea of human liberty is a luxury for those wealthy and powerful enough to consider themselves our betters rather than the birthright of all. As many who’ve taken to the streets in protest have noted, the Trump administration’s assaults on liberty here at home are the kinds of abuses that spurred the revolution we will commemorate this year. But no grand revolution is in the offing this time around. The only just and plausible recourse for our situation is politics – understood not merely as the contest to win any given set of elections but as the broader fight to forge a republic that honors and strengthens our humanity. The American project must and will succeed. Its enemies stand for too little. Our lives are worth too much.

I wrote about Renee Good, Venezuela, Greenland, and what it means to be a human being. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

genius

(this is just realism btw. as a 5'2", being able to interface with chairs in way the Talls could never is indeed one of our great privileges)

it is secondarily a show about how this allows her to invent new and exciting ways to sit in chairs

starfleet academy is a primarily a show about how holly hunter is somehow always even shorter than you'd expect

nothing more properly honors Scott's memory than a crude cartoon drawn incompetently by a plagiarism robot

As we've had another influx of new subscribers the last couple of weeks, thought I would recirculate this list of some of the TV and pop culture accounts I like to follow on here: go.bsky.app/QGgkZaB

This isn't just a casual observation. Fascism scholars have long made this point. It's why calling them "weird" was a more effective strategy than talking about the prices of eggs. Fascism is an aesthetic political movement - you need to make people feel embarassed and horrified by it.

viney plant with white eggplants that loo, well like, eggs.

Friendly reminder that we call eggplant eggplant because the "normal" eggplant used to look like this

do you think Alex Garland is so bummed he didn’t know about Heated Rivalry in time to put those boys in Warfare