LB

Theologians

Love the podcast. Significant force in moving me from atheism to faith.

Walter Duranty would be proud.

It really cannot be overstated how this type of traditionalist propaganda has worked its way into liberal and radical spaces through transphobic feminism. It's the same rhetorical trick--not accepting 'womanhood' (defined as reproductive capacity, naturalized as neutral) is 'misogyny.'

Major Walter Duranty energy; not starvation, just “widespread mortality from diseases of malnutrition.”

been monitoring the hbo max situation; consistently hearing reports that big bird has a fully articulated cloaca that they never show on tv

I am very sorry for your loss. I have followed you both since the other site and I always valued what she had to say.

Andrés Spokoiny i WW @Spokoiny Follow No, Mamdani won't enact a single anti-Jewish measure. I don't even know what those would be. But that's not the point. The point is that 400K of my neighbors don't care that he makes Jews feel unsafe. That's the real tragedy here. 8:38 PM • 6/24/25 • 125K Views

this is an embarrassing thing for this guy to say in public but also touches on something that constantly rankles me, which is the vague idea of "feeling unsafe" as a problem that someone else needs to solve for you regardless of whether you are actually unsafe or not

At least fantasists have some imagination.

Why don’t you go start your own little juche-ethnostate if you like laws regulating freedom of movement so much you law-cucked dweeb

I think you’re confusing peace with quiet.

Just in: Russell Brand arrested

Claiming that atheism is a religion is like claiming that *theism* is a religion; at most, it is a single facet of a larger worldview which, in combination with many other beliefs about many different things, could potentially constitute a religion.

I avoided Cuckoo by @scumbelievable.bsky.social for months because I knew it would make me deeply emotional but I finally finished it and this is one of the best books in the English language. My brain is in tiny pieces.

Miserable sacks of shit are attracted to conservatism, which further compounds their original miserable sack-of-shit-ness like a snake devouring its tail

Add: migration has always been a fact of life, as humans moving around the planet has been a constant throughout all of history and there is no reason why, now that it is easier than ever, that would change.

Annie Dillard once said that just as a painter works from top to bottom, painting over previous layers, so a writer works from left to right, knowing that it is the parts on the left (the beginning) that must be revised the most later.

War becomes a kind of black hole in which all moral constraints on action are obviated, and deaths become “tragic” in the same sense that deaths from earthquakes or cancer are tragic, rather than being “atrocious” as deaths from terrorism are.

You can see this in their mantra-repetition of platitudes like “War is hell” or “every civilian death is a tragedy,” which effectively amount to little more than expressions of nihilism.

Let’s just say JK Rowling like so many owes everything to John Williams and leave it at that.

“Save your apologies,” she types furiously into her Twitter box for the fortieth hour in a row while, elsewhere, far from social media, Daniel Radcliffe is unavailable for comment as he is too busy raising his infant child and being happily married.

A text screenshot from Kaushik Roy’s Global History of Premodern Warfare that reads: “Humans reached New Guinea and Australia about 35,000 years ago and soon killed the megafauna. This megafauna included giant kangaroos, rhino-like marsupials called diprotodonts, ostrich-like flightless birds, each weighing 181 kilos, and big reptiles like a one-ton lizard, land-dwelling crocodiles, etc. Diamond speculates that the giant mammals of Australia and New Guinea died but the big mammals of Africa and Eurasia survived into modern times because the later had coevolved with proto-humans for hundreds of thousands of years. Hence, the mammals of Africa and Eurasia had lot of time to evolve a fear of the humans as the proto-humans’ hunting skill slowly improved. In contrast, the giant mammals of Australia and New Guinea, without any evolutionary …”

A second text screenshot, continuing the first. It reads “preparation, suddenly confronted the humans with developed hunting skills and were soon wiped out. For the giant mammals of New Guinea and Australia, it was a sort of ‘culture clash’. The humans in New Guinea and Australia killed these giant mammals for food, and some of these animals also died indirectly due to fire and habitat modification by the humans. The net result was that the humans in New Guinea and Australia, as in the case of North and South America, were left with no indigenous animals which could be domesticated ( Diamond 2005: 42–4). So the destruction of the inmates of the ‘quasi-Jurassic Park’ in New Guinea and Australia seriously impeded the economic and technological evolution of the humans in these regions. We could speculate about a counterfactual scenario. If the one-ton lizards were domesticated and used for agriculture and riding, then the course of history would have been different...”

do you ever find yourself reading something fairly tedious and dry but then suddenly hit a passage that makes you think that you somehow might be totally fucking stoned

learning that Oprah's real name is Orpah is one of those wedge factoids that will permanently destroy your ability to speak normally about her ever again. it alters your brain chemistry. "Do you mean Orpah?" you'll say, every time. if you're reading this it's already too late