Tom K

I'll tell you two true things:

1. Star Trek TNG is my favourite TV show of all time, one that meant a great deal to me personally and one that I still revisit regularly and enjoy.

2. It is also a show with many bad episodes and shortcomings that were evident to me, even as a young 90s teenager.

it has more in common, in fact, with with the antebellum slaveholder preoccupation with (its vision of) medieval europe, a romantic notion of Anglo supremacy that you can see articulated, in similar form, during the early days of american imperialism at the turn of the 20th century.

four score and seven years later, lincoln would defend the american experiment in similar terms, rooting the the war effort in a defense of freedom and equality — those were the things that made american civilization distinctive in his telling.

interesting to think that revolutionary era americans understood themselves as making a break with the “old world” and establishing a new civilization. and crucially, this new civilization rested on republican self-government, not “sovereignty.”

Sumner gave a speech obliquely recognizing the fact of industrialized rape, and a southern colleague Preston Brooks beat him almost to death in retaliation while others watched and kept his friends from aiding him. Brooks was then treated as a hero in the south. 1

Yes! Rather than chasing Trump's policies, they should chase his strategy of shaping public perception.

That old saw about how "good times make weak men" is true in the sense that stable times with material abundance create reactionaries who want to destroy the systems that protect them because they're too sheltered and stupid to understand that things can get meaningfully worse. Jason CO @jasonc_nc. 2/8/25 I don't think a lot of people appreciate how much of their overall lifestyle and relative certainty is backstopped by a steady, boring stability of systems they don't understand or even realize exist. • 24 L7 1.8K 15K Ill 399K ... Max Dubler @maxdubler True decadence looks like people who are three generations removed from the cultural memory of polio refusing to vaccinate their children against deadly communicable diseases because they don't like needles and don't think there will be any consequences, not queer

So much of our present crisis is coddled, ignorant, and short sighted people tearing down the institutions that protect them because they don’t understand that bad things can happen.

We bought Article II of the United Nations Charter with the blood of a hundred million human beings, and less than a century later, it's being sold for nothing by people who don't even understand what they're doing.

something i'd like to see before i die, although i don't expect it — but it would be cool! — is April 9 becoming a national holiday

"the elite of the antebellum South were degenerate gamblers who financed their lifestyles with industrialized rape and would kill you for pointing this out" is a straightforwardly accurate statement

I am not talking about any real 2028 candidates yet but I fucking assure you the Dem nominee will not be a Trump-praising clown like Smith.

But.

I see a high likelihood he’s going to pull an RFK. Run as a Dem. Get some paltry support. Then throw it to Vance.

Meta’s internal memo said the political tumult in the United States was good timing for the feature’s release. “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” according to the document from Meta’s Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses.

this is comically evil. brazenly anti-social. just absolute black-pilled nihilism. we will not have a republic, we will not be free, until we regulate these companies to the point where — at a bare minimum — they're too afraid to put stuff like this down on paper.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...

Exclusive: White House uses USAID funds for budget director Vought's security, documents show The White House budget office is using millions of dollars from the former U.S. foreign aid agency to pay for the security detail of Russell Vought, President Donald Trump's budget chief and an archit...

The Project 2025 author is using millions of dollars in USAID money for his own security detail.

It is estimated that 762,000 people have *already died* as a result of Elon Musk and Russell Vought’s obscene murder of USAID, including more than 500,000 children.

Vought is a mass murderer.

Given that the administration has stopped trying to defend their EO pushing for more segregation, feels like VT powers that be just want to do this

the minute the fb algorithm clocks you as a straight man it immediately sets about trying to destroy your life & endanger those around you

Exclusive: White House uses USAID funds for budget director Vought's security, documents show The White House budget office is using millions of dollars from the former U.S. foreign aid agency to pay for the security detail of Russell Vought, President Donald Trump's budget chief and an archit...

This man is a thief, coward and hypocrite. He argues the U.S. can't afford to protect workers from scammy corporations through the CFPB, but it CAN afford to pay millions and millions robbed from three different agencies to pay for his imperial guard. #stopvought

www.reuters.com/world/us/whi...

One of the most extraordinarily antisocial acts is to be anti vaccine

I feel this way about pretty much all vaccine-preventable infectious diseases. You shouldn't be allowed to dump cyanide into municipal drinking water and you shouldn't be allowed to recreationally spread viruses around shared public spaces.

related to the view among the professional commentariat that only students at ivys and boutique liberal arts colleges actually matter

This elitist view that only rich/Ivy/private school kids should study/have access the liberal arts is so deeply ingrained in so many highly educated Democrats’ views (including tons who majored in the lib arts themselves) that they don’t even realize they hold it, let alone how ugly & elitist it is

This is so important. I’ve never seen a bunch of leaders more afraid of public opinion — and more unwilling to try to shift it — then current Democratic leadership

They think good is weak & evil is based, because they are wicked. ICE is doing wicked things & hiring wicked men to do them. It is difficult to look such a thing in the eye, but that is all there there is to them

i don’t think there’s ever been anything like it in american history. they *are* who the most hardened conspiracy cultists *think* the rockefellars or the kennedys or the soros family are

It's a good reminder that at least some messaging that we might all dismiss as dumb or obvious is probably essential and useful.

"Who cares about sex trafficked and raped children? Look at the stock market!"

-This absolute fucking bitch, basically.

A friend of ours was able to be a test subject for an mRNA vaccine for an aggressive form of breast cancer. Completely worked. It is one of the greatest miracles of science and like 40% of the country turned it into The Jab because they are mushheaded simpletons.

the rollout of the mRNA vaccines was one of the greatest public health triumphs in history and the end result has been the all-around triumph of the antivax movement and I will never get over it