We Are All Bags Containing Skeletons

I think they want them to sex-segregate again, and I suspect there's a *sotto voce* demand to stop allowing openly gay Scouts and Scoutmasters.
(Speaking of, it really is striking to me that gay rights has become accepted enough institutionally that those demands are sotto voce).

Yeah, just- there's no real talent pool for MAGA propaganda.

Do you know what country the most expats this past year expatriated to? Italy, which is the world heavyweight champ for racism, corruption, and right-wing populism.
It's not about other countries being better, it's about the ability to close your eyes to their evils.

Thought others have had and I've been mulling- a lot of this whole "America is the worst country ever, everywhere else is so lovely and wonderful" shit is white people wanting to go back to having a depoliticized existence- a luxury that I as a Native have never known.

Also, Tim Onion telling on his girlfriend with "Nobody is taking action to fix it in your lifetime". Thanks for letting us know that *you* think your girlfriend's campaign is a do-nothing vanity projet, champ.

Anybody in the Congo would fight in the Kumite for the chance to live in America.

WB owns a third of American pop-culture and somehow can't turn a profit with it. It's like a white elephant with an albatross around its neck with the Mark of Cain hidden on its forehead.

The Russian winter could destroy even Napoleon, and Ellison isn't Napoleon.

Final comment: Warner Brothers is infamously a white elephant that is somehow also an albatross, that is secretly also the Mark of Cain. I fully expect this merger to last all of nine months after the ink is dried until it is violently ejected back out.

Paramount does not have infinite money and Ellison can't force the board to ride their equity value to zero in the name of Trump.

Ellison is throwing good money after bad on this project, and as much as people insist that he doesn't need to *succeed*, just set CNN on fire- no, he does need to succeed, because otherwise CNN and CBS and WB get sold off to cover debts.

This is an observation not from nihilism but from optimism- boards are not omniscient and more importantly what *sells* is, in fact, liberal/left-wing ideas. Ellison's attempts to make fetch happen with CBS have failed and Paramount is hemorrhaging money.

Yeah, let's not ignore the fact that, like, the ultra-rich *as a class* are broadly reactionaries. That includes the board of WB, the board of Netflix, and the board of whatever big company makes your favorite mainstream left-wing show.

Just saw someone reacting to the prospect of WB being bought out by Paramount by posting *They Thought They Were Free*, a book about Nazi propaganda, and I think that people need to fucking take a break from posting for a few days.

"But what if they go after the comics?"
The comics are a rounding error in DC's assets, which means Ellison will either ignore them or try to shutter the entire division.

Lots of confident predictions that Superman will be defending ICE agents from Antifa are flying around that I severely doubt will come to fruition. There's a serious difference between hollowing out a newsroom and a whole film production company.

Also, frankly, I think people are overestimating the amount of stroke Ellison actually has over the creative output directly. *The Naked Gun* was a Paramount movie and wasn't exactly a gladhanding glaze-fest for the far-right and tech billionaires.

The reason for this is at least in part because the market (rightly) can see that Paramount's going down in flames, and if it drags WB with it that's good for Netflix.

I spent over a month outside the US last year. Greece, Portugal, Mexico. All of them were great and welcome changes from day-to-day. But living in a place that’s growing like a weed, full of friendly & polite people, and lots of opportunities to touch grass makes this kind of post hard to relate to

This country has played host to the darkest form of chattel slavery ever practiced, tore itself apart less than a century after its founding, fought tooth and nail to prevent women from voting, rode itself into the ground in the greatest economic collapse in recorded history, dropped the only a-bomb

All of that more than 75 years ago. All of the progress since that little snapshot ends took less than a human lifetime to achieve. Naive extrapolation of a recent backslide is a good way to scare yourself silly but not a good way to actually predict where the world goes from here.

Extrapolation is a cognitive bias that *anybody* who has worked around financial markets knows well. Stuff that goes up (down) tends to keep going up (down)…but doesn’t forever. Assume a trend continues indefinitely at your peril.

And since financial markets are structured and organized expressions of human psychology…well, you tend to see patterns that are usefully applied elsewhere.

Anyhow reader I hope a stranger said “excuse me, after you!” to you in the grocery store today. Or you to them. Either way really.

A "she" who apparently very performatively declares that she isn't open about being trans because... she wants to spite all the bad trans people who are crazy leftists, or something.
Honestly, what this has told me is that being performatively not-left is as embarassing as being performatively left.

I am told they are a "she", apparently. Okay. They didn't really care about getting someone else's gender right and responded to that by calling their interlocutor a rapist. I'll be better than that.

Obviously not the whole conversation, but it's the most relevant parts of it by my measure. Coming out of the gate with just the worst faith and never stopping because I dared to have a different opinion.

Right, so this guy was shamefully following me for a while and had decent interactions with me, and then he had an interaction with another one of my followers and, just... This guy has an ugly soul and is the worst OL culture. Don't have much else to say, really.

Okay, I'm done here. Unfollow me or I block you and make it clear to everyone else what your character is.

You're eliding a lot of other details but also you've been so personally unpleasant to me and mandoqueer at this point that I'm not going to pursue the subject any further. Congratulations, you won whatever weird meta-argument you're having in your head.

I see you have a difficult relationship with the truth. Saying that someone "is the reason bear mace people stay in business" after bringing up their misogyny is a blatant insinuation that they're a rapist, and being cute and going "But I never *said* the R-word, tee hee!" is scumbag behavior.