Patrick "Inverted Vibe Curve" Blanchfield

the boys are back in town but that town is omelas

the "boys are back in town" may be a happy anthem but its very pleasure also depends on sorrow. for while we celebrate the boys return we also know they must leave. even now the hour of their departure draws close. perhaps we ourselves will be the ones who drive them away

This is a phenomenal book. Pick it up if you can!

its a funny parapraxis on trumps part but also: we suckers are all gonna have pay PT barnum in the end

You Can Just Do Things | Patrick Blanchfield As ever, the horrors Trump embodies implicate more than just his singular odious person. His “habit of abusing power to force his will upon an uncooperative world”—in David Frum’s formulation over the...

What differentiates Trump from his predecessors is his total inability to conjure the pretense of at least pretending to publicly care about pretense. www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

I’ll take it!

can try to take heart in the need for such disconnection being rooted in soulless loneliness. No other way to maintain that level of aloof

like, much as it was so hard to overcome being raised to believe in the existence of hell, and thus all the more dysphoric to now find myself wishing so many people could go rot there, it's really queasy to find myself - despite myself - envying trumps utterly unflappable lazy indifference

alongside the corrosive buildup of richly deserved but fruitless rage at so many powerful and shameless people another cumulative toll of these years is the dysphoric experience of simultaneously envying yet reeling from the ability of stone cold monsters to give so few fucks about anything

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"No matter how crude or clumsy Trump may be in forcing his will upon the world, his grandiose and murderous entitlement is directly continuous with his predecessors’."

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"You can just do things, sure, right until the game is up, and then you can’t."
@patblanchfield.bsky.social in @nplusonemag.com on the war in the Middle East, also applicable to what the US is doing on other crises and emergencies of our time: climate, debt, inequality, AI

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You Can Just Do Things | Patrick Blanchfield As ever, the horrors Trump embodies implicate more than just his singular odious person. His “habit of abusing power to force his will upon an uncooperative world”—in David Frum’s formulation over the...

Is it really such a shock that a man who’s bragged about sexual assault doesn’t give a shit about the tedious rituals of manufacturing consent from a populace he despises before getting violent? If you’re President Trump, you can just do things. www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

I've gotten a bunch of very upset messages. I am not going to reply to them, and I am not going going to presume any given one is tendentious, sincere, a misunderstanding, whatever. I will simply say: I do not support war crimes. no matter who is president.

do not ask me to supply war crimes.

even if this were not the US and Israel we were talking about and even if the last twenty, fifty or whatever years had not happened, preemptively attacking another nation is a war crime. that really should be enough to say. and yet.

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

You Can Just Do Things | Patrick Blanchfield As ever, the horrors Trump embodies implicate more than just his singular odious person. His “habit of abusing power to force his will upon an uncooperative world”—in David Frum’s formulation over the...

my latest column in @nplusonemag.com: on Iran, the Millennium Challenge of 2002, why no one wants to learn anything, and how the repressed returns regardless www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

I'd never heard of this insane rigged wargame we fought in 2002 to tell ourselves we'd win the war no matter what. Great framing for the abhorrent clusterfuck of now.

all @markkrotov.bsky.social, that one, and splendidly

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🙏 that propublic piece is WILD

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so many thanks to the inestimable @markkrotov.bsky.social, king of editors and prince of men - and to the wonderful Lisa Borst as well

You Can Just Do Things | Patrick Blanchfield As ever, the horrors Trump embodies implicate more than just his singular odious person. His “habit of abusing power to force his will upon an uncooperative world”—in David Frum’s formulation over the...

my latest column in @nplusonemag.com: on Iran, the Millennium Challenge of 2002, why no one wants to learn anything, and how the repressed returns regardless www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

so many thanks to the inestimable @markkrotov.bsky.social, king of editors and prince of men - and to the wonderful Lisa Borst as well

seriously, enough is enough with them running maoist-naxalite splinter groups in T